Coral Gables takes control of a landmark house that’s near collapse. Who’s to blame?
Outside, on the wall surrounding a prized historic enclave inspired by the town villas of 18th Century France, a small terracotta plaque proclaims the two-story, 100-year-old house behind it a “Coral Gables Landmark.”
But behind the wall lies a shocking sight: a roofless, windowless husk that Gables city officials say is in danger of collapsing. If it does, it could also possibly take down an attached, equally historic home that’s still occupied by its worried owners.
Now, after what frustrated residents of the Gables’ famed French City Village say has been years of baffling inaction from a city widely known for strict building codes and zealous historic preservation, a growing public outcry and the increasingly precarious state of the house and its conjoined neighbor have set off a belated official scramble to salvage what remains of it.
In a rare emergency action, Gables officials this week took temporary control of 1021 Hardee Road in order to shore up the house to prevent its collapse, with the cost to be billed to its owners, along with newly imposed fines that are now mounting at the rate of $2,000 a day. The contractor hired by the city will also waterproof the badly leaking house next door.
Neighbors and city officials say that the mysterious private trust that owns the property failed to comply with emergency orders to stabilize the house, even as it put the wreck up for sale, listing it on Zillow for $2.7 million.
But no one — not city officials and not long-frustrated neighbors and preservationists — can explain how Coral Gables, which has been celebrating its centennial this year, let things get this far gone in one of its signature historic districts.
Residents of the French City Village, one of seven themed architectural enclaves commissioned a century ago by Coral Gables founder George Merrick, say the city until recently did little to address their complaints even as the house at 1021 Hardee, vacant since it last sold in 2017, for $1.2 million, slowly fell apart.
Things got much worse after the owners removed the first-floor roof and part of the second-story roof a year ago, in apparent preparation for renovations that never happened, and then left it that way, said Amy Schwartz, whose home shares a structural party wall, townhome-style, and a second-story roof with the hazardous ruin next door.
As a consequence, the city’s construction regulation board determined in a July 21 order, the walls of her house have cracked. Rainwater now pours into her home from the roof and wall and has damaged interior walls and floors down to the ground level, Schwartz said.
With her own second-story roof also structurally compromised, she and her husband have been advised by a contractor not to sleep upstairs, where the home’s bedrooms are. She and her husband have instead been sleeping on sofa beds downstairs, Schwartz said. A blue tarp now covers their second-story roof to keep some of the water out.
“We’ve had a lot of emotional distress. We have lost basically all the property value of our house. I love my house. I feel very special living in this special place,” Schwartz said. “But what’s been allowed to happen next door is really just unacceptable.”
The city construction board also found peacock nests and rodent and termite infestations at 1021, in addition to piles of building debris.
The plight of Schwartz and the 1021 house is especially alarming to neighbors because the homes on their block, some of the most sought-after in the Gables, all interconnect, sharing garden walls and pavilions, and in some cases structural elements. The 10 properties on the north side of Hardee are arranged in a semi-circle that wraps around the block, bringing to mind an elegant Parisian neighborhood. Across the street on Hardee are larger, detached homes with a slightly more rustic look that are also part of the historic village.
The connected villas boast architecture that is refined and rarefied even by Coral Gables standards. They were designed by a famed society architect of the day, Mott B. Schmidt, who also designed Manhattan townhouses and country homes for Astors, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and did not stint on lavish details in his designs for the Gables village.
Miami-Dade County property records list the home’s owner as the Juan M. Delgado Trust. The late Delgado, a prominent builder, was a well connected figure in Coral Gables. His daughter, Evangeline Delgado, a Gables resident and real estate agent, has implied to city officials and neighbors that she’s the house owner, both say.
But at a code enforcement hearing earlier this month, an attorney for the trust said she is not the official successor trustee. He added, however, that he did not know who the trustee is because he was filling in for the trust’s regular attorney, leaving board members and neighbors who attended the hearing confounded. The names of trustees in private trusts are not public record.
“It was unbelievable,” said Schwartz, who attended the hearing.
The managing partner of the firm representing the trust, Michael Peterson, did not respond to an email and a message left with his office.
A spokeswoman for Coral Gables said the city has not been able to determine who the trustee is.
Evangeline Delgado, who is listed as the selling agent on the Zillow property listing, did not respond to a voicemail left on the phone number for her on the web page or to a contact form filled out by a reporter.
Coral Gables Vice-Mayor Rhonda Anderson called the uncertainty over who controls the property “a disturbing situation” that may have contributed to its prolonged state of deterioration. Another factor, she said, is that the ownership trust had been using private contractors to inspect the planned house renovation. Those contractors may have submitted misleading reports to the city indicating progress on the renovation work, she said. A review of that is underway and could lead to reforms, she added.
“I feel that this trust has been playing games with the city,” Anderson said.
Anderson said she learned of the condition of the 1021 house only after the April city election, when she asked newly re-instituted city manager Pete Iglesias to urgently look into it. Iglesias had been fired two years earlier following earlier elections by a new majority bloc on the city commission, but was rehired after Mayor Vince Lago and Anderson, political allies, regained the majority with the election this year to the commission of a third ally, Richard Lara.
“I told the manager it was one of the first things that needed his attention due to the level of damage to the house, and the damage that has been caused next door by the inaction of their neighbor,” Anderson said, referring to the Schwartz residence. “He has taken very swift action to get this resolved.”
Iglesias declined interview requests relayed through Anderson and city spokeswoman Martha Pantin.
Victor Diaz, a lawyer and French City Village homeowner who has been leading neighbors’ effort to get the city to fix the mess at 1021, confirms that Iglesias’ involvement got officials moving after years of tepid response. City inspectors began citing the trust and the city’s code enforcement and building regulation boards held hearings on the matter and issued orders for repairs in June and July.
But he said that action came only after the property had languished for nearly eight years since its purchase in 2017 under the Delgado trust ownership, which left it vacant in preparation for a top-to-bottom restoration, eventually approved by city in 2021.
Only demolition work has taken place. Not only was the roof taken off, but contractors either gutted the inside or interior walls and the second floor caved in. Those are gone, leaving the house a hollowed-out shell.
Evangeline Delgado eventually stopped speaking to the Schwartzes, Amy Schwartz said.
“She immediately started to demolish the inside and worked only sporadically,” she said. “She doesn’t talk to us. She has put us through a lot, the whole neighborhood. It’s not right.”
The property has been on the city’s radar for years. It has cited the property for multiple code violations dating back to 2019, when the city code enforcement board first ordered the trust to secure and maintain the house, Diaz said. But there was little evident subsequent action by the city or the owners, he added. For two years, he said, he has been asking city officials to do something about it with no meaningful response.
Instead, Diaz said, the city appears to have granted the trust repeated extensions to do the work to save what he described as “one of the most historic structures in the city.” Challenged on the extensions, city officials provided no good explanation, he said.
“The structure was exposed to the elements, and there is debris all over the site,” Diaz, a former Miami Beach city commissioner and former chairman of its historic preservation board. “We were assured there would be no more extensions. We continued to wait patiently. Nothing happened.
“I was appalled by the complete lack of explanation of why it was being allowed to occur.”
The construction regulation board, he said, began imposing a daily fine of $150 in November of last year, “a paltry amount,” Diaz said.
Still the owners did nothing, he said.
It wasn’t until June that the city code enforcement held its first public hearing on the property in years to enforce the 2019 repair order, Diaz said. The board imposed a lien on the property, then granted the owners additional time to comply.
In July, the city construction board declared the house an unsafe structure and gave the owners five days to fix the situation. No one representing the trust showed up to the hearing, Diaz said.
At about the same time, in a hearing at which neighbors showed up in force, the code enforcement board found the property owners in violation of the city’s strict “demolition by neglect” ordinance, designed to stop owners from skirting protections that bar demolition of historically designated structures by allowing them to fall into disrepair. Evangeline Delgado, issued a summons by the board, did not attend.
The city then seized control when no work had been done at the property by a 5 p.m. Monday deadline. On Tuesday, workers red-tagged the property, meaning the owners must stop all work on the house.
In a statement issued in response to questions from the Miami Herald, the city said it has hired a contractor and granted permits for shoring up the listing house and waterproofing the Schwartz residence.
Diaz and other preservationists wonder why it took the city so long to take firm action and why it didn’t impose its demolition by neglect powers much earlier.
“It’s a shame this was allowed to happen,” said Karelia Carbonell, president of the Coral Gables Historic Preservation Association. “There has to be a remedy, and let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later.”
Carbonell noted the city has not hesitated in the past to wield its demolition by neglect ordinance, including in one recent instance..
That came in the case of a protected wood cottage in the city’s McFarlane Homestead Historic District, which covers a formerly segregated Black neighborhood founded by Merrick at the western end of Coconut Grove, that had deteriorated to the point it had to be torn down. The city ordered the owners to build an exact reproduction of the two-bedroom house, which is done and now up for sale for $995,000.
One longtime resident of the French City Village said the loss of the 1021 Hardee house would significantly hurt the district’s historic value because the homes are so closely intertwined. Meg Daly she and her husband bought in the village in the 1990s to raise their family.
“One of the reasons that we bought is there was such a strong sense of community, and a shared appreciation for history and the history of buildings,” said Daly, the originator of the Underline urban trail and linear park project now nearing completion beneath the elevated Metrorail line along U.S. 1. “We loved it. It’s just such a special place. It’s like being transported to Paris, and that’s really a gift.
“There is such scarcity of these precious buildings, and the impact of one being gone would be like destroying a neighborhood. And once it’s gone, there is no reclaiming the history.
“The city is usually very vigilant, so this really surprises me. I don’t know what happened.”