ST. GEORGE — After nearly a decade of planning, the $200 million residential and commercial Lighthouse Point development on St. George's waterfront held a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday.
The project — built on a former U.S. Coast Guard base next to the St. George Ferry Terminal — started construction in February and will bring 115 residential units, 30,000 square-feet of retail, a 30,000 square-foot co-working space, a parking garage and a public plaza to the neighborhood, expected to be completed by 2018.
"It will be the first true live, work, play in St. George," said Lester Petracca, president of developer Triangle Equities. "We hope it will spur the creation of future projects to follow in a similar vein."
The development is one of several large projects headed to the North Shore of Staten Island — dubbed the "Core Four" including the New York Wheel, Empire Outlets and Urby Staten Island — and officials said it will help bring a different type of housing stock to the borough.
"Staten Island is overwhelmingly a bedroom community... that doesn't mean we can't have a different housing topology, that doesn't mean that we can't have a safe, clean, hip waterfront community and this is going to be that," Borough President James Oddo said. "This is going be a funky place to live and we mean that in a great way."
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The second phase of development — expected to start construction next year — will build a new 175-room hotel on the site and renovate six historic buildings for a mix of retail spaces and restaurants, Petracca said.
Lighthouse Point was announced in 2006 after Triangle Equities won an RFP to build on the former Coast Guard site.
Petracca said the group was attracted to the high medium income of the borough and wanted to fill a gap of rental units to prevent young Staten Islanders from fleeing to other parts of the city.
"Staten Island is the wealthiest borough in the five boroughs from a median income standpoint," Petracca said.
"You don’t really have a really serious hotel here. You have millenniums [sic] who are coming up and want to stay on Staten Island and they’re forced to go to Manhattan and this will hopefully keep them on the island."
The project hit several bumps along the way — including retaining a historic wall and figure out how to build over the Staten Island Railway — and was almost derailed in December when the state put a hold on the $16.5 million in subsidies proposed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the development, Politco New York reported.
