Bridgeview Celebrates 20 Years With New Sister Site

John Vitale has been part of the Island Park community for 30 years. And now he’s helping to lead its renaissance.

His staple business, Bridgeview Yacht Club, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. He’s opening a new catering hall, The Loft by Bridgeview. He’s building apartments on the site of his former restaurant, Paddy McGee’s. And he opened Island Park’s first supermarket.

Bridgeview has been Vitale’s most well-known establishment. People come from all over to married at the Island Park location. But it wasn’t always that way.

“When it opened up 20 years ago, it was a nightclub and a restaurant, and catering was a small component of it,” Vitale said. “About the first 10 years of Bridgeview it had a night club, and then we started doing weddings.”

Things took off from there. Vitale owns a swath of land on the southern tip of Island Park, just over the Long Beach Bridge, where he has had many different restaurants. One of the most well-know, Paddy McGee’s, was decimated by Hurricane Sandy. Instead of rebuilding, Vitale decided to tear the iconic restaurant down and build apartments for the Island Park community.

“It’s tremendous down there,” Vitale said. “We built the shopping center. There’s a Wendy’s opening in about a month. It used to be parking lots and vacant lots.”

The new space, The Loft, is also being built atop one of Vitale’s other locations. Just across from Bridgeview sat Warehouse 5, a more club-type establishment. That is being turned into The Loft -- a smaller-scale catering venue that Vitale is building to attract a new type of clientele.

“There are two things we wanted to capture: smaller weddings, which are getting more common,” said Vitale. “The other thing we’re exploring is people who try to do destination weddings, and they’ll go upstate and look for a barn. We’ll be more upscale than a barn, but we’ll appeal to those people. The Loft will have a rustic, eclectic feel to it.”

Work on converting Warehouse 5 into The Loft will begin in January or February, Vitale said, with an expected opening in the spring of 2017.

“I’m very optimistic and encouraged about the future of Island Park,” he said.

Photo: Google Maps.