It was in the middle of summer in 1980 when developers raising a pair of luxury condominium towers in Surfside, Fla., went to town officials with an unusual request: They wanted to add an extra floor to each building.
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The Champlain Towers South condominium, right, before it partially collapsed in June. |
Although there is no indication that the catastrophic collapse of the Champlain Towers South building in June was related to the tacked-on penthouse, the alteration was just one of many contentious parts of a project that was pushed through by aggressive developers at a time when the local government seemed wholly unprepared for a new era of soaring condo projects.
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Mehrdad Sasani, a professor of engineering, said the penthouse addition wouldn’t explain the cause of the collapse, but that it could have exacerbated a failure elsewhere. |
Investigators with the National Institute of Standards and Technology are still in the early days of examining the building’s collapse, with ongoing examinations of the integrity of the foundations and the strength of the materials used to support the building. The investigation will include a review of how the building was designed and constructed, including the building’s modifications, the agency said on Wednesday.
Troubled pasts
By the late 1970s, Surfside was still a humble corner of
South Florida, so popular with Canadian snowbirds looking
for a discounted slice of paradise that the town dedicated a
week to celebrating the connection. Winners of the
festival’s beauty pageant could receive a trip to Canada.
One of the Canadians with an eye on the town was the lead
developer of Champlain Towers, Nathan Reiber, who brought a
grand vision to reshape Surfside’s waterfront at a time when
the town was eager to find new sources of tax revenue to
keep taxes low for full-time residents. As Mr. Reiber’s team
filed for the first Champlain Towers permits in August 1979
— with no 13th-story penthouses — city officials were
struggling with serious inadequacies in the water and sewer
systems that had led to a moratorium on new development.
The Champlain Towers developers came up with a plan: They
would provide $200,000 toward the needed upgrades — covering
half the cost — if they could get to work on construction.
The town agreed.
“It was exciting,” said Mitchell Kinzer, who was the mayor
at the time. “Here we are, little Surfside, a tiny town
getting first-class luxury buildings.”
Mr. Reiber pursued the project even as he was dealing with
legal troubles in Canada. A lawyer from Ontario who had
ventured into real estate, Mr. Reiber and two partners were
accused by Canadian prosecutors of dodging taxes in the
1970s by plundering the proceeds of coin-operated laundry
machines in their buildings in a scheme to lessen their
taxable income. The prosecutor also accused the group of
using the expenses of a fake building project to avoid taxes
on some $120,000 in rent payments.
After court proceedings that dragged on for years, Mr.
Reiber pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion in 1996.
Family members of Mr. Reiber, who died in 2014, did not
respond to messages seeking comment.
Mr. Reiber’s lawyer, Stanley J. Levine, also figured
prominently in the development of Champlain Towers, handling
corporate work for some of the companies involved.
About a decade earlier, Mr. Levine and a member of the Miami
Beach City Council had been charged with soliciting an
$8,000 bribe from a woman who wanted a zoning variance to
build a 47-unit apartment building, according to news
coverage from the time. The charge was later dropped. Mr.
Levine died in 1999, and a member of his family could not be
reached for comment.
Allegations of influence-peddling also dogged the Champlain
Towers project. In early 1980, the developers had made
campaign contributions that were significant at the time —
$100 to one commissioner, $200 to another. Mayor Kinzer
objected, and the developers tried to take the money back.
Rick Aiken, the town manager who later had to step down,
said the Champlain Towers builders were constantly pressing
the town to move faster on permits.
“They’d call me on the phone, want to take me to lunch so
that I would push the commission toward giving them a
permit,” Mr. Aiken said. He told them that they needed to
follow the rules, he said, adding that he could not recall
any instances of the developers engaging in improper
activity.
On Nov. 13, 1979, the town approved the overall plans for
the project.
‘Grossly inadequate’
As the construction got underway at the Champlain Towers
sites, both at their North and South properties, turmoil was
emerging and plans were changing.
By May, the project’s lead contractor, Jorge Batievsky, had
resigned. He soon filed a lawsuit, though records from the
case have since been destroyed and Mr. Batievsky has died.
The developers brought in a new contractor, Alfred Weisbrod,
but problems continued.
As the first levels of the South building were rising above
the ground, a crane on site collapsed so violently that its
steel was contorted, according to archived video. A week
later, crews discovered that more than $10,000 in wood had
been stolen from the site.
But public anticipation was building. A newspaper ad for the
unfinished buildings claimed that only 27 residences
remained available. “Get the best — while they last,” it
advised.
By the end of the summer, the developers hired a new
permanent contractor, Arnold Neckman, and in August they
applied to add the new “penthouse” floor to each property,
raising the buildings from 12 stories to 13.
The added weight brought by the penthouse had the potential
to exacerbate a failure and contribute to the progressive
collapse that killed 98 people this year, said Mehrdad
Sasani, a professor of civil and environmental engineering
at Northeastern University who reviewed the building’s
design plans. He also said the decision to add a new floor
to the top of a previous design was not an accepted
practice.
But the penthouse addition would not explain the cause of
the collapse, Dr. Sasani said, since buildings are designed
with large safety margins. “The relative weight of the
penthouse compared to the weight of the structure is not so
significant that it could have been an initial cause,” Dr.
Sasani said.
There is no record of an objection from the architect on the
project, William Friedman, or the structural engineer,
Sergio Breiterman.
Both had come to the project after some criticism of their
past work. State regulators suspended Mr. Friedman’s license
for six months in 1967 after an investigation determined
that he had designed a “grossly inadequate” sign structure
that fell over during Hurricane Betsy two years prior,
damaging the structure of a Miami commercial building,
according to records from the Florida Department of Business
and Professional Regulation.
About five years before the Champlain Towers project, Mr.
Breiterman had been responsible for inspections on a $5
million parking garage in Coral Gables, where officials
later found that the walls in the building lacked steel
reinforcing rods that would prevent cars from crashing
through, according to a 1976 article in The Miami Herald.
Mr. Breiterman also got the job of inspecting work at
Champlain Towers. He gave his seal of approval to the work
in October 1980, before the penthouse dispute began.
‘A violation of the code’
A month later, in November, the town appeared to approve the
added-on penthouse permit, although it is unclear who signed
off on the idea. Two weeks later, the police chief, serving
as the interim town manager, sent a curt memo ordering the
contractors to halt work, revoking their penthouse permits.
The memo, sternly warning that the penthouses were in fact a
violation of Surfside’s codes, came on town letterhead, with
the name of Mr. Aiken, the town manager who by that time had
been arrested on the peeping charge, crossed off with a
series of X’s. (The case against him was later dismissed,
with Mr. Aiken saying he had been looking for his dog behind
people’s homes.)
Then, a week later, the Town Commission voted to allow the
penthouses after all.
Mr. Filiberto, the former commissioner, said he believed
that some of the penthouse construction was already
completed by then. He said the town was left with a tough
choice: Grant a variance or order the builder to demolish
the penthouse work — and face a lawsuit.
Years later, Mr. Filiberto wondered whether the developers
played equally loose with other aspects of the building
project. “If they are that overt in violating the height
orders,” he said, “think about all the little intricacies
that go into building the building.”