The Boats. The Birds. The Views.

Newcomers Entranced by Waterside Life in Northeastern Anne Arundel

Niki McGuigan had long wanted a life like the one she has in Powhatan Beach, a calm, shady and watery neighborhood in northeastern Anne Arundel County.

She enjoyed growing up in the Aspen Hill section of Silver Spring, where she had a close family and a wide circle of friends. "But the area . . . was landlocked," she said recently as she looked toward Stony Creek at the end of her cul-de-sac. "And the Beltway was out of control. My longtime goal was to one day marry and raise a family by the water -- but still be within easy reach of Montgomery County. I'm confident I've found that over here."

McGuigan, 29, a former social studies teacher, is raising two children. The drive to her parents' house off Georgia Avenue takes about 50 minutes, depending on traffic. She began her eastward migration five years ago, when she married Larry McGuigan and moved to a starter duplex in Glen Burnie. In 2005, they discovered Powhatan Beach in Pasadena, where they bought a single-family house with a nice yard. They're now the parents of Alyssa, 2, and Alexander, 3 months.

Larry, also 29, commutes to his job as a physician's assistant for Johns Hopkins University in White Marsh, north of Baltimore. His commute, which takes him through the Harbor Tunnel, usually runs 35 to 40 minutes, depending on traffic.

Living near Stony Creek, a tributary of the Patapsco River, north of the Magothy River, "colors my life, mentally, spiritually and geographically," Niki McGuigan said.

She said she enjoys taking Alyssa to the community-owned beach to feed the ducks, throw rocks, and watch the Jet Skiers and boaters. "It's also nice having all these seafood restaurants practically within walking distance. And in summer, there's a snowball [frozen treat] stand nearly everywhere you look. I learned quickly after moving over here that besides blue crabs, snowballs are a big Baltimore tradition."

In 1749, four decades after the first English settlement was established in Anne Arundel, London merchant Thomas Welbourne claimed the first land grant on the peninsula separating the Patapsco and the Magothy rivers, according to the book "The Pasadena Peninsula: A Closer Look at the Land Between Two Rivers," by Isabel Shipley Cunningham. Soon, Englishmen were snapping up choice land along the water. Starting in the 1660s, tobacco was the big bayside crop, with much of the work done by slaves and indentured servants. Acres of hardwood forests were cut down; lumber was moved by barge to nearby ports, including Baltimore.

Dan Poist, an agent with Re/Max Advantage Realty in Eldersburg, noted that Powhatan Beach provides a range of houses, from bungalows to Colonials. "Like a lot of places in Anne Arundel County, it started out as summer cottages, second homes for people from Baltimore to get out of the heat of the city. And people gradually started converting them to permanent residences." Prices are now generally between $250,000 and $500,000.

At Solley Road and Powhatan Beach Road, the sole entrance to the community, Elmer Dunn owns a small accounting firm that was established by his father. Dunn, 50, who lives in a mobile home next to the office, grew up down the street. He described the community as small and quiet -- but not as small and quiet as in the days before the county installed water and sewer lines.

"It's only 15 minutes by boat to the Chesapeake Bay," he said. "When we were kids, it was great. We would go out in the bay and fish and crab, bringing back two or three bushels. It's not as plentiful now."

Dunn's mother, Margaret, has lived in the same house on Powhatan Beach Road for 52 of her 71 years. "We had a dirt road; I never locked my doors. We spent our summers down at the beach. My husband, when he was alive, wouldn't have lived anywhere else," she said.

Powhatan Beach has the same hold on Denise Cogar's husband, Bill, who recently retired from Washington Gas. One look at the peaceful water view was all it took to close the deal, she said.

"He didn't care about looking at the inside," she said. "He called the Realtor and said we wanted to put a contract on it."

The Cogars, originally from Bowie, bought the house in 2002 for a little less than $300,000, she said. "We had to gut the whole inside," she said. "We put a new driveway in. And it didn't have a porch. It had some siding on it. It's a money pit."

Their inventory of water "toys" includes Jet Skis, kayaks and a 23-foot boat. "You'd be silly to have anything smaller to go out in the Chesapeake," Denise Cogar warned.

For Concetta Barth, 57, living in Powhatan Beach is like being on a permanent vacation, with a water view and bald eagles swooping down. She credits her daughter, who had moved to the neighborhood first, for encouraging her parents to sell their home in the Woodlawn section of Baltimore County.

"We had just fixed up our house in Woodlawn," she said. "We loved our neighborhood, but we couldn't go out at night" because of crime fears. In Powhatan Beach, they made some cosmetic changes to the house and refurbished the pier. Crime is no longer a worry.

Although she owns a place at the Delaware shore, "now that we've got this, we got no interest in going down there," she said.

Often, when McGuigan pulls into the neighborhood shopping center, she's treated to a sight that wasn't part of life back in Aspen Hill. "You see seagulls everywhere!" she enthused. "That's so neat. It's definitely another reminder that we're part of a water community."