‘You can knock anything down’: A rash of landmark home demolitions riles Miami Beach
In 2013, entrepreneur and developer Moishe Mana, who owns large chunks of Wynwood and downtown Miami’s Flagler Street, paid $5.2 million for a Mediterranean villa on Miami Beach’s Hibiscus Island that was designed in 1937 by August Geiger, perhaps the most important local architect of the early 20th century.
Six years later, Mana, who never lived in the 5,500-square-foot bayfront house, got a permit to tear it down. He then flipped the property for $12 million to Paramount Miami Worldcenter tower developer Daniel Kodsi, who is replacing the historic home with a 9,800-square-foot residential behemoth shaped like a set of glass-and-concrete cubes.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, the City of Miami Beach, known far and wide as a bastion of historic preservation, did nothing to save the Geiger house, which its own planners tagged as architecturally significant.
In fact, the city that built its storied revival on the preservation and renovation of a rich trove of Art Deco, Mediterranean and mid-20th century buildings does little to protect its equally defining stock of historic and architecturally significant single-family homes and estates from the same era.
Even as the city’s elected officials established a series of strictly regulated historic districts that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean from South to North Beach starting in the mid-1980s, they shied away from extending the same protections against demolition and alteration to its residential islands and single-family neighborhoods to the west.
Now, as speculative developers and high-profile multimillionaires and billionaires snap up choice residential properties along the bay amid a buying spree, a trickle of demolitions of older homes has turned into a cascade. And a largely toothless system designed to encourage — but not require — preservation of significant homes built before 1942 has proven singularly ineffective in stemming the tide.
Mana is far from alone in tearing down an old house in Miami Beach. The city, which has no power to block most home demolitions, received 34 teardown applications in 2021, up from 13 in 2020 and 24 in 2019, according to city records and data from the Miami Design Preservation League.
To the politically powerful real estate brokers and developers behind many of the home teardowns in the Beach, no house is sacred, no matter how historic or architecturally distinguished — and they say little stands in their way.
“Any time Nelson (Gonzalez) calls me and asks ‘Do you think you can knock it down?’ and I say ‘Yes, it might be a fight, but you can knock anything down,’” prominent South Florida luxury home developer Todd Michael Glaser said, referring to Nelson Gonzalez, a top Beach broker who often teams with him to acquire, flip and sell houses.
Gonzalez candidly explained the tension over historic home preservation and new construction: “The newer class of wealthy people coming here want what they want,” he said. “The historical people can stand up on their soapbox, but at the end of the day they can’t stop you.”
The demolition applications involve some eye-popping dollar figures and celebrated names in finance and entertainment business that have generated international coverage. They include Thoma Bravo private equity firm’s co-founder and managing partner Orlando Bravo, who paid $40 million for a grand 1929 Mediterranean manse owned by drummer and singer Phil Collins before applying to tear it down.
Bravo secured approval from Miami Beach officials to replace it with an increasingly common architectural choice following teardowns — a massive, contemporary glass-and-steel structure of the type many millionaires embrace, but critics and neighbors deride as having the architectural appeal of a big-box store.
New York couple Alex Kleyner and Diana Ulis, meanwhile, paid nearly $44.5 million in 2020 for two significant 1930s homes in the Sunset Islands. The one is an expansive Mediterranean estate designed by prominent architect Carlos Schoeppl for Fisher Body automotive mogul William Fisher that preservationists say is among the city’s most important residential landmarks. They promptly obtained a city permit to tear both houses down, but haven’t done so yet.
Their planned replacement is a two-story, 15,000-square-foot residence with a rooftop lounge, kids’ playroom, gym, guest house, pool and dock — and a futuristic design that resembles a spaceship.
In the latest instance, Lucia Penrod, CEO of Nikki Beach, the South Beach oceanfront restaurant that has spawned a worldwide chain, filed a demolition permit application in December for the 1925 home she’s occupied for many years — also a Geiger design. In something of a twist, though, she plans to replace it with a Mediterranean mega-villa designed by an architectural firm specializing in traditional home design. Last week, the Miami Beach Design Review Board gave her permission for the demolition.
Goodbye to Capone’s house?
The threatened historic home that has generated the most attention is gangster Al Capone’s longtime Palm Island residence, a 1922 Mediterranean estate, complete with a 60-foot-long swimming pool. He died in the house in 1947.
In 2021, Glaser and Gonzalez bought it for $10.7 million. They announced their intention to tear it down, then amid a public outcry flipped it untouched for nearly $5 million more a month later. The buyer, listed on public records as a corporate entity managed by a Coral Gables man, has not disclosed plans for the property.
The uncertain fate of Capone’s old abode — which could be settled at a hearing at Miami Beach City Hall on Tuesday — underscores what critics say is the weakness of city rules governing old and historic houses, as well as administrators’ and officials’ unwillingness to safeguard the long-established look and character of the city’s single-family neighborhoods.
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After members of the city’s historic preservation board nominated the Capone house for designation in November as a protected landmark, city planners balked. In a preliminary analysis released last week, they concluded the house meets two of the legal criteria for historic designation — satisfying just one is sufficient for protection. But, unusually, the planning office then recommended against pursuing the matter further. Planning officials said that city records list no architect for the house, which is not noteworthy according to planners’ analysis, and that Capone is insufficiently distinguished to make the house worth saving.
The Beach preservation board could still override the recommendation and vote at Tuesday’s hearing to proceed with a full historic designation study. The ultimate decision could fall to the Miami Beach commission, which must ratify designations endorsed by the preservation board. Though the city has the power to designate a residential property as historic, longtime policy has been to do so only with owner consent. That means it’s rare that homes are ever protected outside the relative few that sit within established historic districts, which consist mostly of commercial properties and apartment buildings.
Demolition applications surge
The teardown trend, which has prompted consternation and anger among certain Beach residents, has become a blazing-hot potato for property owners looking to demolish old homes. Indeed, Mana, Penrod and Bravo, and their representatives, all declined to be interviewed for this story.
When the Miami Design Preservation League, the organization that successfully pushed for creation of historic districts and landmarks in the Beach, launched an online petition to save the Fisher Body founder’s house. Change.org removed the page after receiving a letter from a lawyer for Kleyner and Ulis claiming it had generated threats against his clients. League director Daniel Ciraldo said the lawyer also asked the group to take down its webpage on the house. The league refused, saying that would amount to erasing a piece of the historical record of the debate over the home’s fate.
The league and other preservationists and residents want the city to enact reforms giving officials explicit power to block demolition of old homes deemed significant — something other local cities, including Miami and Coral Gables, as well as Miami-Dade County, have long done as a routine matter. Courts have consistently ruled that governments have the authority to mandate preservation of historic private properties under their zoning powers.
“We’re facing a major crisis here,” said Jack Finglass, an architect and chairman of the preservation board in Miami Beach, who blames a lack of political will among commissioners and the pressure of big money flooding into the city. “Frankly, greed has taken over this part of the world completely. It’s literally a crazed atmosphere here. There will be nothing left.”
Rising seas threaten historic homes
But Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said that doesn’t justify imposing a historic designation on unwilling homeowners. He said it would be unfair to restrict their ability to do with them as they see fit, because homes can represent the bulk of their owners’ net worth. Moreover, he said, old Beach homes face a greater threat from rising seas and deterioration from saltwater and air than any others in Miami-Dade, since they sit barely above sea level. That means many may not be worth the trouble and expense of saving, he said.
“There are thousands of homes that you’re talking about, that are the most valuable asset of their owners,” Gelber said. “We have to be cautious.”
Residents and preservation activists like Ciraldo say they worry Miami Beach’s residential architectural heritage, including numerous distinctive houses built by the city’s founders and developers and other notables of the time, is fast disappearing.
They say that if the city won’t save a home owned for many years by a major, if ignominious historic figure like Capone, or estates designed by key architects like Geiger, who played an important role in the development of early Miami Beach, then they fear little else of historic significance will stand for long.
Even the palatial Mediterranean-style residence of Carl Fisher, who developed Miami Beach, is not designated as a historic site. It was painstakingly restored by Glaser and partners, and is now occupied by prominent Miami developer Ugo Colombo. But the lack of protection means there’s no assurance it also won’t be destroyed in the future, Finglass and other preservationists say.
The Carl Fisher house is another design by Geiger, also responsible for the iconic Dade County Courthouse, the Miami Women’s Club and Villa Serena, William Jennings Bryan’s winter retreat in Miami. All three are among several Geiger works listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Glaser himself provides proof that it’s possible to restore old homes and make money at it. Not only did he help save the badly rundown Carl Fisher estate, but he boasted that he’s restored numerous others on Palm Beach and Miami Beach — including his own primary residence, a Carlos Schoeppl-designed 1935 Mediterranean house on Flamingo Drive.
“People,” Glaser said, “don’t know how many houses I’ve saved.”
The chief factor determining when to save a house or tear it down, he said, is how far off the ground it is. If it sits below the designated flood level, it’s simpler to demolish. Owners prefer to knock down rather than elevate a home on a lot they want, Gonzalez and other brokers said. And given off-the-charts demand for these single-family houses and the short supply, that means the knockdowns will continue unabated, they say.
Glaser said Miami Beach should require owners keen on demolishing a pre-1942 house to donate a certain amount to a fund that would then allow the city to offer to buy out an owner wishing to demolish another house the city deems historic and preserve it.
Finglass, who lives on North Bay Road, a bayside magnet for demolitions, said the gargantuan Modernist houses replacing nearly 100-year-old Mediterranean homes and estates are dramatically out of scale and character with the neighborhoods they occupy — a view he said many Beach residents share. While he conceded that city ordinances give homeowners the right to tear down their houses, he noted that’s a right the city has the power to regulate — and should.
After previous skirmishes over home preservation, Miami Beach adopted ordinances requiring review of demolition of homes built before 1942 by its Design Review Board. But the board can’t block demolition, only try to persuade owners to save homes. In fact, critics say, they rarely do and rarely ever succeed.
Critics also lashed out at what they described as uber-wealthy newcomers indifferent to Miami Beach history, its cultural or built heritage and — to hear some of the critics tell it — to architectural taste or knowledge.
“The huge majority of them are bare concrete and bare glass Lego boxes, and they sell for millions and millions of dollars,” Finglass said. “The fact is, a lot of these people don’t care what they build, as long as it’s big. Money makes it right. And if you don’t have that kind of money, you don’t count. But we the people who live here and who would like to have a future here have rights, too.”
Ciraldo, the Miami preservation league director, said a survey recently prepared by his organization showed Miami Beach still has about 2,500 homes built before 1942.
“There is still quite a lot to be saved, but the clock is ticking,” Ciraldo said. “We have this whole side of the city where preservation doesn’t exist. It’s an existential question. Right now, these demolition applications are at a level we have never seen before.”
Buyers want new construction
Real estate brokers say many well-heeled buyers simply prefer the Modernist and typically minimalist style of the new home construction, which has “less concrete, less aluminum, and a lot more glass, which lets in more natural light,” said Julian Johnston, a Corcoran Group Broker Associate who works in the Beach.
The issue is hardly a novel one for the Beach.
The first high-profile home demolition case came in 2012, when “Real Housewives of Miami” star Lisa Hochstein and her husband, a plastic surgeon, bought a 1925 neo-classical home on Star Island designed by another leading architect of the day, Walter DeGarmo, and tore it down despite a concerted campaign by preservationists. The 20,000-square-foot neo-Mediterranean house they built in its place is so architecturally gaudy that the show’s producer, Bravo TV, jokingly dubbed it “Scarface’s House” — a reference not to Capone, but to the fictional 1983 film starring Al Pacino as a Miami cocaine lord.
A rash of so-called McMansions followed, raising hackles on the Beach, but leading to little action by the city.
There have been rare exceptions. A 2014 campaign by preservationists helped persuade homebuilder Stuart Miller, CEO of Lennar Corp., to change his mind about tearing down a historic house on Star Island that was once part of Carl Fisher’s Miami Beach yacht club. Instead, Miller had the home restored after it was moved to a corner of his property to make space for an immense modern mansion next to it.
Critics blame the teardown trend on what they say is the influence at City Hall of speculative developers and powerful real estate agents, and the temptation posed to even devoted longtime Beach homeowners by the often outlandish-sounding prices offered for properties on the waterfront or the sought-after residential islands. Even mansions barely a decade old are being torn down, Ciraldo said.
“I think it is a political minefield for the city to deal with,” he said. “When you have this rush of people coming in with ungodly sums of money and you have no safeguards with any teeth, these issues will continue to surface. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the city to do anything.”
Evolving architectural tastes
To city planners, the replacement of older homes, while in some cases not desirable, marks a natural evolution in architectural tastes and scale. Beach planning director Tom Mooney conceded it’s also the result of deliberate policy and political decisions by elected leaders.
Complicating matters is the fact that raising historic homes to meet new flood rules and withstand rising tides and hurricane surge in the face of climate change is often not practical, Mooney said. Doing so would also disrupt the architectural integrity that makes them valuable in the first place, he said.
“I have always told (elected leaders) that it’s probably the most challenging decision or policy decision we face,” Mooney said. “The single-family architecture does help define Miami Beach. There are few places in South Florida you can drive along and know without a sign where you are. These are unique areas with a unique look. Nobody wants to see all these homes replaced. No one wants to see an August Geiger home replaced. But this is someone’s home. You put that all together, it makes it very challenging.”
Some houses are safeguarded, Mooney said, but they are the exception. Certain single-family homes sit inside historic districts and are thus are protected from demolition, while 31 Miami Beach homes of historic value have been voluntarily designated as landmarks at the request of their owners. That means those homes can’t be demolished absent extreme circumstances, but preservationists say it still leaves the majority of older houses in the city at risk.
If significant houses disappear, though, Gonzalez said it’s no great loss.
“That’s what the historical preservation people are for,” Gonzalez said. “They have photographs.”
This story was originally published January 9, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
