LONG ISLAND CITY — A new hotel that will soon boast a rooftop bar and a restaurant with outdoor seating opened its doors last week in Dutch Kills — a neighborhood already dotted with more than two dozen lodgings, and more coming.
Boro Hotel opened earlier this month at 38-28 27th St., where co-owner Antonia Batalias is set on standing out from the crowd with ample communal spaces, and balconies and terraces attached to many of the rooms.
"We really want to offer something unique," she said. "We really focused on design. We really focused on, when completed, what the experience would be for guests."
Each of the hotel's 108 guestrooms is slightly different in design from one another, though all have floor-to-ceiling windows. Rooms currently start at $179 a night.
The lobby has a fire pit and a cafe selling coffee drinks and light food, like sandwiches and salads, and there's an event space on the 13th floor where glass windows offer panoramic views of the neighborhood, according to the owners.
There are plans to open a bar on the roof of the 14-story hotel later this summer, and another bar and restaurant will open on the ground floor with outdoor seating this fall, Batalias said.
"A place for the locals to mingle after work," she said.
Long Island City has seen an influx of hotels in recent year. A report from the Long Island City partnership this spring put the number of those currently open at 25, with more than two dozen others in the works.
"It's kind of a phenomenon for how in such a small area there's so many hotels," Batalias said.
Construction has been particularly fervent in Dutch Kills — which began when the city was getting ready to rezone the area to restrict building heights in 2008, and developers sought to get the "highest and best use" of their property beforehand by building hotels, Batalias said.
"Hotels popped up with the caveat that it was in such close proximity to Manhattan," she said. "We wanted to build something different. Since most of the hotels came about as a zoning play, the people involved in those projects were not hoteliers that really stood out with a vision."
Hotels have thrived in the area as Long Island City transitioned into more of a tourist spot, with a number of "heavyweight" cultural institutions — like Noguchi Museum and MoMA PS1 gaining popularity, she said.
"Long Island City is such a wealth of culture, in both the arts scene and the food scene and event scene," she said. "The world is sort of recognizing it's a destination on its own."
