SURFSIDE — "Survived
by."
It’s a staple in obituaries, the start of a straightforward
sentence listing the deceased’s family members.
In the stream of obituaries that have been coming ever since
a Florida condo collapsed on June 24, these simple sentences
tell quite a story. Those who died are survived by family
all over the world, from New York to Seattle, Cuba to Costa
Rica, Russia to Venezuela.
|
|
Even though Surfside is a piece of one of America’s largest
metropolitan areas, in many ways it’s a small town, located
in the middle of a long, densely populated strip of land
between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay.
To the south, in trendy Miami Beach, buildings routinely
reach nearly 50 stories tall. To the north, in ritzy Bal
Harbour and Sunny Isles, the coast is lined with even
taller, shinier towers — and there are plans to add the
tallest beachfront building in America, a Bentley Residences
that will rise 749 feet above the current sea level and
contain more than 60 stories.
In between, there is this one-mile gap in the skyline of
Miami’s barrier islands, a place where the beachfront
buildings are limited to 12 stories.
This is Surfside.
That’s one of the many cruel ironies of this disaster. If
Surfside was known for something before June 24 — and in
many ways, it remained somewhat of a well-kept secret — it
was that its high-rises weren’t nearly as high.
And when you go inland between 88th and 96th streets — away
from the beachfront dominated by the hotel that was the
historic Surf Club and now is a Four Seasons — it’s not just
that the buildings there are limited to four stories. It’s
that, at least by Florida coastal standards, many of the
homes are still modest, the businesses still mostly
mom-and-pop.
While a Starbucks and Subway have crept into the two blocks
of shops on Harding Avenue, the street is lined with local
places like the Kosherland supermarket, the Rolling Pin
bakery, Justin’s Barbershop and Josh’s Deli.
There are six synagogues within walking distance. The
community center, already a gathering spot in normal times,
was transformed into a family reunification center after the
collapse.
“This is a very small town — the kind of place where if you
don’t know me, then your friend knows me,” Joshua Marcus,
the 47-year-old owner of Josh’s Deli, said one morning while
cooking breakfast. “So this is kind of like if a fire
happened at the church in ‘Little House on the Prairie.’”
He doesn’t add — doesn’t have to — that if the fire didn’t
kill someone you know, it killed someone your friend or
neighbor or regular customer knows.
Surfside’s population in the last census was 5,744 people.
When the condo fell and more than 100 people were lost, it
meant that about 2% of the town’s population was gone. One
in 50, overnight.
From a purely statistical standpoint, this would be like
Oklahoma City’s residents waking up and finding out they had
lost more than 12,000 neighbors. It would be like Manhattan,
with a population of about 1.6 million, losing more than
30,000 residents in one night.
But statistics — heights of buildings, number of residents,
even the rising death toll — don’t really tell the story of
the Surfside collapse. They don’t tell you how this has
affected the 49 out of 50 who remain, the town and the
people who are the survivors.
What was missing
Shortly after the collapse, Marcus and his small staff at
Josh’s Deli began making sandwiches and delivering them to
the first responders working at the pile of rubble in the
sweltering July heat.
The first time they did it, he says none of them was the
same for days.
The part that got to him wasn’t what you might think. It
wasn’t seeing a body. It was seeing a balcony, the sliding
glass doors open, curtains flapping, two empty chairs facing
each other.
“My business partner and my server got drunk that night,” he
said. “I don’t blame them. I don’t drink. So I ate a whole
cake.”
He has a very Miami story. He grew up in New York, moved to
South Florida, met a Cuban girl from Hialeah, and had a
daughter, Gala, who now is 3.
He opened the deli 12 years ago in this small space, with 22
seats inside and about a half-dozen on the sidewalk. The
walls are covered with a mix of eclectic art, old family
photos and totems for good luck. He wants it to feel like
his living room.
When he’s here, though, he typically can be found at the
grill. Customers take a seat at the counter and chat with
him while he works, wearing an apron and a mask. A bumper
sticker on the stainless steel above them says “I (HEART)
SURFSIDE.” Taped next to it, a piece of Israeli currency has
an added handwritten message:
“Shalom or Go Home!”
He makes a “Jewban” sandwich — a Cuban with pastrami instead
of ham — for a lunch customer and explains that the deli
didn't stop making and delivering sandwiches to the condo
site after that first experience. At this point, they had
delivered more than 600 sandwiches. He roasts the turkey
himself. He buys some ham. He’s Jewish and doesn’t normally
make sandwiches with pork. But he knows some of the first
responders appreciate it.
When police come in, he doesn't let them pay — even though
this has been a brutal year for many businesses here,
including his.
They just were starting to get back to a bit of normalcy
after COVID-19. Ever since the collapse, a stretch of
Collins Avenue, the northbound street nearest to the ocean,
has been closed, and a stretch of Harding Avenue has a
temporary barrier running down its middle, turning three
southbound lanes into one lane heading each direction.
The resulting gridlock has led customers to steer clear of
Harding, and has been another blow to businesses.
A regular plops down onto one of the chairs at Josh’s
counter, orders a sandwich and matter-of-factly says he’s
going out of business soon.
Businesses take another hit
They lament about how tough it has been, how the potential
loans aren’t really much of a help — but then both say it’s
hard to complain when there’s a pile of rubble less than a
mile away.
A friend started a GoFundMe page for Josh’s Deli and it
raised more than the $5,000 goal in less than 24 hours. Just
talking about this makes his eyes well up.
“There are no words,” he says. “Compound that with
everything else and it’s all too much. It’s like an emotion
shower.”
Across the street from the deli, next to a small cigar shop
that has been there for decades, owned by a family that
escaped Cuba, there’s a door that says “Mario the Tailor.”
Walk up the stairs, open another door and you’ll find Mario
busy at work.
Mario Vita and his wife, Angie, were born in Italy and ended
up meeting in Canada. They moved to Surfside nearly 40 years
ago, buying Verdile’s, a tailor shop that already had been
in business for 20 years.
Not far from a black-and-white photo of Mario as a
10-year-old boy, an apprentice in Italy, there are photos of
him as an adult, now in his 70s, standing next to some of
his handiwork being worn by Julio Iglesias, LeBron James and
Dan Marino.
The Bal Harbour Shops, which has been described as “the most
luxurious mall in America,” are located just north of
Surfside. Some of the clothing stores send their famous
customers here. Sometimes those customers want the Vitas to
come to them.
Angie Vita recalls when they were asked to go to Ricky
Martin’s house. She smiles and says she made sure to help
with that one.
Connections to those lost is haunting, but not unusual,
it's the norm
Most of their clients you wouldn’t
recognize. But the Vitas know their names and faces — and
seeing a picture of Nancy Kress Levin appear on television
felt surreal, like it couldn’t be right.
Levin had been in the shop not all that long ago. She was
telling Mario about her hearing aid. He didn’t want to get
one. She showed him how small hers was.
Levin lived in Unit 712 in Champlain South. One of her sons
was staying with her. He had come from Puerto Rico to attend
the funeral of a friend. Another son lived on the same floor
with his wife and her son. All five were lost in the
collapse. So was Cassondra Stratton.
The 40-year-old model and Pilates instructor dropped off
some clothes at the shop a few days before the collapse,
about the time her husband left for a business trip.
Stratton was on the phone with him when the building
crumbled. The line went dead and she had been listed as
missing until Monday, when authorities announced they had
identified her body.
“Such a sweet girl,” Angie Vita said. “It’s just terrible.”
Her clothes are still there, ready to be picked up.
This story, this haunting connection, is hardly unusual.
It’s the norm. Everyone in Surfside has all kinds of them.
Some of them take a seat at the counter in Josh’s Deli and
talk to Josh as he works. These days he isn’t just making
food that was featured on a couple of television shows,
drawing visitors staying at nearby hotels. He’s providing
therapy to the regulars. And he isn’t trained to do this.
None of them are, he says. But they’re all trying.
“It’s getting more and more difficult for me to hear all the
stories,” he said. “The amount of times I’ve talked to
someone like this and just wanted to cry …”
His voice trailed off. He continued, saying this isn’t like
9/11. There isn’t the common enemy.
Locals have 'the community'
“It’s this weird dynamic,” he said. “George Bush isn’t
throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. The fans
aren't chanting ‘U-S-A’ to unify people. It’s just
different. I lived in New York then. When Derek Jeter hit
that home run, people lost their (expletive) minds because
it was so emotional.”
He’s quick to say that the support for Surfside has been
overwhelming. It has come from all over the world, in ways
that are big and small.
But even here in South Florida, if you leave Surfside, you
can feel the story starting to fade. He doesn’t expect
faraway places to have flyovers and yellow ribbons for
Surfside. He does expect Surfside to continue to rally
around itself.
“The thing we have here is the community,” he said.
While many Surfside residents grew up someplace else, Tina
Paul was born in Miami Beach and six months later her
parents bought a home here.
Her childhood home, and many others in the 1960s, didn’t
have air-conditioning. They were cooled by the breeze
blowing off the ocean and through their jalousie windows.
When it got really hot in the summer, they hopped in the
pool at the old community center.
Paul remembers her father saying they had to get
air-conditioning when the condos started going up, blocking
that breeze.
She headed to New York in 1980 to study photography. She
made that her career and made New York her home, using her
camera to document the city’s nightlife. After 20 years
there, she was thinking about moving back to Surfside. One
day in 2001 changed her thinking.
“After Sept. 11, I didn’t want to leave New York,” she said.
“I felt this solidarity with the city and an obligation to
stay.”
Now her solidarity and obligation are with her hometown.
She and her longtime partner moved back here 10 years ago to
care for her ailing parents. That’s when she really started
to notice both how unique the town was — and how it was
changing.
Paul got involved with historical preservation. She started
going to town meetings. She ran for office in 2016 and was
elected to the five-member town commission. Now she is vice
mayor.
Still a night owl, she was awake at 2:10 a.m. on June 24
when the phone rang. It was Town Manager Andy Hyatt calling
to tell her what had happened. She ended up being awake for
more than 40 straight hours. The weeks since have been a
blur.
“I try to just keep going,” she said during a phone
conversation after midnight, at the end of a recent day.
“I’m feeling stronger today. But the other day, I spoke with
a reporter, I answered all of his questions and then he
looked me in the eye and said, ‘How are you doing?’ I almost
broke down. I said, ‘I can’t go there. That’s when I would
lose it. I need to be strong for the community.’”
When she was growing up, she didn’t give her community much
thought. She used to tell people she was from Miami Beach
“because nobody knew where Surfside was.”
In the 1970s, she found those neighboring towns — from Miami
Beach with its art deco to Sunny Isles with its wonderfully
kitschy-themed beach motels — to be more interesting than
the place where she grew up.
While the Sahara Beach Club remains in Sunny Isles, its
camel figures out front, most of those kitschy hotels are
long gone, replaced by towering buildings like the Trump
Palace.
And now Paul finds Surfside more interesting.
As she and her neighbors continue to grieve and try to cope
with what happened, she hopes that what happened June 24
will lead to changes in the future — and not necessarily the
kind of changes South Florida has seen in the last 40 years.
“In Surfside, we already were trying to be pioneers of a lot
of environmental initiatives,” she said. “I feel that now we
have to be on the forefront on the reform of regulation of
buildings, what is allowed to be built and where it is
allowed to be built … We need to figure out what caused
this, because it’s not just poor maintenance of a building.”
Priest asked: 'Was it empty?'
Juan Sosa came to South Florida from Cuba
60 years ago, when he was 14 years old. His parents sent him
and his sister to America as part of Operation Peter Pan, a
mass exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors shortly
after the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
He became a Catholic priest.
About 10 years ago Sosa came to St. Joseph Church, a parish
that does services in four languages (English, Spanish,
Portuguese and Polish) and has a parking lot straddling the
line between Miami Beach and Surfside — just three blocks
inland from Champlain Towers South.
He begins most days by taking a walk on the beach, typically
passing the condo on his way to the sunrise and sand.
On June 24, he didn’t hear the building collapse in the
night. But as he started walking, he heard sirens. And he
kept hearing them. Police were blocking off streets. He
ended up on the beach with some other parishioners, looking
at a building that had 55 of its 136 units sheared away.
“Was it empty?” he asked them.
No, they told him.
Sosa said a prayer, the first of many to come, for the
victims and for the survivors.
Nothing prepared him for this. Five days after the collapse,
he wrote a piece for the archdiocese that began, “For this
experience, there is no specific training in the Seminary.”
The next week he started leading funerals. One of the first
services involved three caskets for one family — two for
Marcus Guara and Anaely Rodriguez and one for their two
daughters. Family members decided to have Lucia, 11, and
Emma, 4, buried together, in a small white casket with pink
and purple ribbons, the girls’ favorite colors.
The morning after that funeral, sitting in his office at the
parish, Sosa talked about what he said at the service — or,
perhaps more significantly, what he won’t be saying at any
of the services for those who died in the collapse.
“This whole idea of ‘Oh, it's God's will and it was written
somewhere that they had to die …,” he said. “God does not
will this. I think this is a result of human imperfection.
Why God permitted it, that’s a mystery.”
He added a rhetorical question — one he has asked repeatedly
since the collapse.
“Does it take a tragedy to bring people together?” he said.
“My hope is that we learn from this experience, not just
about the material things such as how to fix a building, or
how to prevent it from collapsing, or not even how to live
without the stuff we have. But we learn about the quality of
life.”
Asked how he is doing, he paused for a moment to think about
how to answer that.
“I don’t know how to put it,” he said. “Am I in a state of
shock or the state of service?”
It seems clear that for many in Surfside the answer to that
question is both. They remain in a state of shock. And yet
they also remain in the state of service, making sandwiches,
coordinating city efforts, raising money, saying prayers,
mourning those who are gone, comforting those who are still
here.
Music for the soul
It was being in a crowd, listening to Mahler’s Fifth
Symphony, that got to Rabbi Fred Klein.
He was sitting there in Temple Emanu-El, about six miles
south of Surfside in Miami Beach. It was Thursday night, two
weeks after the collapse. The day before officials had held
an emotional press conference near the site, saying they had
transitioned from search and rescue to search and recovery.
This event, an interfaith musical gathering titled “Console
the Soul: Prayers for Surfside,” was partly to raise money
for victims and families. But it also was to help those who
gathered in the huge rotunda of the synagogue.
Outside, life felt fairly normal. Well, normal for South
Beach. Young men and women were dressed for a night on the
town. People sat at tables outside restaurants, the scent of
all kinds of food wafting through the air. When a crosswalk
signal turned green, a rollerblader cut through the middle
of the intersection, punctuating his crossing with a
dramatic spin.
Inside, people lit candles, prayed and listened to music led
by Michael Rossi, artistic director and founder of the Miami
Beach Classical Music Festival.
Klein, a chaplain for the Greater Miami Jewish Federation,
was one of the faith leaders asked to speak between songs.
The federation has raised nearly $2 million to help all the
families affected by the loss of belongings and life. Klein
and other chaplains took turns being available to console,
counsel, and simply listen.
He got on the stage after the orchestra played the Adagietto
slow movement of Mahler's Fifth, a piece for strings and
harp that has been described as “an island of calm in the
seething tumult of the Fifth Symphony.”
“This event ... happened after a hellish year,” he told
those gathered. “All of us have been traumatized in
different ways from this past year. Of COVID, of being
alone, of not having the gift of music. And I found myself
welling up in tears listening to Mahler.”
As he spoke, thanking the musicians, his voice cracked.
He moved after about a year. And when he saw the images the
morning after the collapse, at first it felt confusing, like
a picture that didn’t add up. Then he started to realize
what he was seeing.
Right before the musical event, he spent about an hour with
an 80-year-old woman who escaped the building. She’s a
survivor. But, he says, so are many others.
“I think that building collapsing, the floor falling out, is
something all of us, in some way or another, experienced
this past year,” he said. “We thought we knew where we were.
We thought we understood our place. And then suddenly things
changed very quickly.”
For many who gathered, this was the first time seeing live
music in a long time. And what got to some of them came near
the end of the event.
As soprano Elizabeth Zito sang Christian songwriter Kari
Jobe's “I Am Not Alone,” Rossi invited the crowd to join in.
And they did, singing words for those who were lost — but,
perhaps even more so, for themselves, the people a condo
tower is survived by.
I am not alone.
I am not alone.
You will go before me.
You will never leave me.