Surfside condo collapse memorial, anniversary event first priority for new town leaders
Nearly a year since the condo building collapse, the first order of business for newly elected Surfside Mayor Shlomo Danzinger and the Town Commission will be plans for an anniversary event, a memorial to the 98 victims and commemorative signage at the site of the tragedy.
Families of those who died in the June 24 disaster are expected to attend a special commission meeting Tuesday dedicated exclusively to Champlain Towers-related initiatives. Danzinger, a first-time politician who defeated former Mayor Charles Burkett, said he wants the family members to join a committee to help the town properly memorialize their loved ones.
“It shouldn’t be made by a committee of city officials and artists,” he said. “It should have the family members making these decisions on what they want to see and what would be ideal to honor the memories of their families.”
Despite being the site of one of the worst building failures in U.S. history, Surfside has been stripped of virtually all traces of what happened last year.
The oceanfront property where the 12-story Champlain Towers South once stood, at 8777 Collins Ave., looks like a big hole in the ground. A sign hanging outside says it’s a “construction site.”
Drivers heading down Harding Avenue no longer see the stuffed animals, posters and flowers adorning a memorial wall that hung outside the public tennis center. It was taken down for preservation and replaced with a smaller memorial wall tucked away near the entrance to the courts.
Danzinger said the “most pressing” topic is the anniversary event because it needs to be planned in the next couple of months. He considered inviting the search-and-rescue teams to thank them for their efforts following the collapse, but he said he wants the families to be at the “forefront” of any decisions.
He also wants to install new signage at the collapse site remembering the victims. He said it’s “dishonorable” that there is no marker there currently. Building a permanent memorial to the victims may be “a few years away,” but Danzinger said he wants to discuss options for what it could look like and where it would be located.
The two-acre collapse site is planned to be sold to a private developer to build a luxury tower and Danzinger said he would like to work with the eventual buyer on putting a memorial somewhere on the site. Some of the families of the victims have advocated to build a memorial on the site. They have proposed raising money to buy the land or doing a land-swap with the town’s community center.
“It’s hard to understand why somebody would want to build over that,” he said. “Who’s going to end up living on top of a bunch of graves?”
Commissioners voted in January to explore creating an off-site memorial on 88th Street, directly north of the Champlain Towers property. The Florida Legislature voted in March to allocate $1 million on a Champlain Towers memorial.
Martin Langesfeld, 24, whose sister Nicole Langesfeld and brother-in-law Luis Sadovnic died in the collapse, said he still hopes for a memorial on the land where his family members died.
“That’s Number One, and it will be Number One until it happens,” he said.
Langesfeld will attend the meeting after he said Danzinger called him. Some family members are coming from New York, Danzinger said.
The next regularly scheduled meeting was supposed to be April 12, but Danzinger said he opted for a special meeting on Champlain Towers-related issues so family members are not forced to wait hours at a regular meeting for their items to come up.
Langesfeld said he was happy with the special attention the new town leadership seems to be paying to the families and victims of the collapse. He said he recalls his parents waiting until very late at night one commission meeting to hear a discussion related to the disaster.
“I think this is a direction that we needed to be going the day after that building collapsed, not 9 months later,” Langesfeld said. “So I’m very grateful that the new town leaders are going in the right direction and taking steps to help keep our loved ones’ names alive.”
This story was originally published March 28, 2022 at 3:08 PM.
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