In its heyday, the Deauville Beach Resort, a Miami Beach hotel, was a sleek emblem of South Florida cool, hosting the Beatles, Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy, not to mention innumerable weddings, proms and poolside parties.
But on Sunday, as a crowd of onlookers cheered and shouted, the hotel was leveled in an implosion, leaving behind a billowing cloud of dust, a pile of rubble and lingering questions about the future of the oceanside site on Collins Avenue.
In an email to residents after the building was destroyed, Mayor Dan Gelber said that the city had waged a “long and tortured court battle with its neglectful owners who left it in disrepair for five years.”
“It had to be imploded because multiple building officials and judges told us it was unsafe,” he said an interview on Monday.
Mr. Gelber acknowledged that the future of the site was uncertain after Miami Beach voters on Tuesday rejected a referendum he had supported, which would have allowed Stephen M. Ross, the chairman and founder of Related Companies and the owner of the Miami Dolphins, to take control of the site and build a hotel and condominium complex there.
“We need to go back to the drawing board and find a better option for its future,” Mr. Gelber wrote in the email to residents.
Built in 1957, the Deauville was a recognizable attraction on Miami Beach, with the clean lines and lavish interiors typical of the architectural style known as Miami Modern, or MiMo.
The building featured a dramatic porte-cochere fashioned of parabolic curves over the driveway entrance, and the sign out front had a star instead of a dot over the letter “i” in its name.
In 1964, the “Ed Sullivan Show” broadcast the Beatles live to 70 million people from the hotel’s Napoleon Ballroom, helping to certify the band as an American sensation. Thousands of young fans thronged the hotel, clamoring for a glimpse of the lads from Liverpool.
The Deauville’s owners shut down the hotel after an electrical fire in 2017. The city of Miami Beach took them to court, hoping to force repairs. But the owners indicated they did not have enough money from insurance to do the necessary work.
In January, the city recommended demolition after the owners filed an engineering report that found the building to be unsafe. Concern about the hotel’s structural integrity grew after the Champlain Towers South condominium collapsed in June 2021 in neighboring Surfside, killing 98 people.
The Deauville property is owned by a corporate entity registered to the Meruelo family, which runs other hotels and casinos and also works in construction. In January, Jose Chanfrau, a lawyer for the family, dismissed the notion that the owners had let the building fall into disrepair after the fire and further damage from Hurricane Irma in 2017.
The owners spent “millions of dollars to save the hotel,” he said in a statement then. “The ownership is committed to bringing back the Deauville to its glory days.” But Mr. Chanfrau said on Monday that he no longer represented the family and referred questions to a family member, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Daniel Ciraldo, executive director of the Miami Design Preservation League, watched the implosion on a live feed on Sunday morning, an experience he called “devastating.”
“Anyone you ask here has a memory of going to the Deauville, whether they would go to prom there or their grandmother would go there,” he said. “It’s a landmark to the community and there are memories there that will remain, but seeing the physical building be imploded, it was just hard to bear.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/us/miami-deauville-beach-resort-implosion.html
