In the late 1970s, a group of Canadian developers swooped into Surfside, a golden-beached winter haven with a dysfunctional small-town government. There they laid the foundations for a cluster of high-rise condo buildings along the coastline just north of Miami Beach, three of which would carry the “Champlain” name. Their fourth tower, the Mirage on the Ocean, doesn’t have the same branding as Champlain Towers South, which partially collapsed in June, killing 98 people, or its sister towers, Champlain Towers North and East.
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The Mirage on the Ocean condo tower in Surfside, pictured Oct. 2, 2021, was developed and designed by some of the same players who built Champlain Towers South. |
“The problems that we know about with the building that failed — putting that together with the cracks in this [Mirage] building — tell me that we do need to do a fairly thorough investigation of the structural design,” said Shankar Nair, an engineer based in Illinois with more than 50 years of experience designing large structures.
Still, Surfside has not asked its engineering consultant — whose charge is to examine the roots of the Champlain South collapse — to take a closer look at the Mirage, as it did for the similarly designed Champlain Towers North and East. Despite the overlaps between the buildings, Surfside will not even acknowledge that links exist between the Mirage and Champlain South. “Any connections between the Mirage and the Champlain Towers South are neither confirmed or dispositive at this point,” Malarie Dauginikas, the town’s spokesperson, wrote in an email. “The Town has not received any reports from the Mirage regarding the structural integrity of the building.”
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In the 1970s, a group of Canadian developers swooped into small-town Surfside with plans to build four condo towers. It took more than 15 years. By the end, one of the towers, the Mirage on the Ocean, had a different name than the three Champlain-branded projects — obscuring its origins from residents and town officials after Champlain Towers South’s deadly collapse. |
Town council meetings grew infamous, serving as the staging area for a bribery caper involving the vice mayor, who was arrested in 1978. The town administration was helmed by a rotating cast of managers whose tenures often lasted only months. “Boy, were there fights,” Richard Aiken, who took over as town manager in June 1979, told the Herald. “Maybe not fistfights, but yelling and screaming at each other … We were caught in the middle so often and sometimes a glass of water was thrown at town councilmen up there on the dais, spraying back and forth. It was just mind boggling.”
Into this maelstrom of dysfunction stepped a group of self-made businessmen from Toronto, born in Europe. Several had survived the Holocaust. Nathan Reiber became the face of the consortium that would — through various partnerships and reconfigurations — build Champlain Towers South and Champlain Towers North, which both opened in 1981, as well as the Mirage on the Ocean and Champlain Towers East, which opened in the mid-1990s. A Toronto lawyer and developer, Reiber moved permanently to South Florida in the early 1980s after “abscond[ing] to Miami” when he was charged with tax evasion in Canada, according to a Hamilton Spectator article on his guilty plea in 1996. (A judge ordered him to pay a $60,000 fine.)
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Construction scaffolding is seen near the entrance of the Mirage on Oct. 2, 2021. The tower, which has ties to the collapsed Champlain South, has been under renovation for about two years. |
They said they could help the town — offering to foot part of the bill for repairs needed to fix its beleaguered sewer system. But some elected officials were skeptical, worrying that any help they received from the developers would come with the expectation of something in return.
In late August 1979, the vice chairman of Surfside’s Planning and Zoning Board let loose as the board was grappling with the hefty task of reviewing Champlain South’s complex plans. “A lot of consternation has crept into this thing,” Joe Roberts said, according to meeting minutes. “What’s cooking here? … Nobody figures that the builder is going to give the town [funds] and not want something for it.” Aiken, the town manager, was a strong advocate for the approval of Champlain Towers North and South, according to newspaper articles and meeting minutes from the time. He pushed the town council to approve sewer repairs that would allow the towers to move forward and stayed on top of the Planning and Zoning Board — sometimes to the board’s annoyance. In late 1979, its chairman said the board felt “unduly pressured” by Aiken’s persistence. (Aiken was forced out of town government the next year after he was accused of peering through his neighbor’s window at their young daughter. He denied the accusation, saying he was looking for his dog, and the charges were dismissed. It was his second alleged infraction, having been arrested earlier that year by Fort Lauderdale police for soliciting prostitution as part of an undercover sting, an episode he described as “entrapment” at the time. Those charges were also dismissed.) Meanwhile, Surfside’s building department relied heavily on George Desharnais, its well-qualified but part-time inspector, to help its officials vet the plans. At points, Desharnais, too, showed his exasperation. A year after Champlain South was approved, Desharnais had difficulties arranging for bewildered planning board members to view the plans for the East tower in a timely manner, an episode he called “embarrassing,” according to meeting minutes.
The debate over sewer repairs and the building moratorium dragged into the summer of 1980, stalling Champlain South. When it was finally resolved, half of the repair funds, $200,000, came from the developers. Roberts, the vice chairman of the planning board, criticized exceptions granted by the town council, such as allowing a penthouse floor at Champlain South that pushed it beyond the town’s 12-story limit. “We were all sold a bill of goods,” he told the Herald in January 1981.
‘ONE TOUGH SON OF A BITCH’
Champlain Towers South and North sold out
after opening in 1981, helping launch Surfside’s
revitalization. The Mirage was a different story. A
partnership controlled by Abe Blankenstein, Joseph Fialkov,
Isadore Goldist and his brother Harry Goldlist bought the
land for the project in 1980, backed by a $12.5 million
mortgage. The developers laid pilings and foundations. Then
the bottom fell out of South Florida’s real estate market.
“Fortunately, all we had on the site was a hole in the
ground,” Blankenstein wrote in his biography.
“Unfortunately, while we waited, we had financial
obligations to the bank to make mortgage payments and that
money came out of our pockets.” For the rest of the decade
and into the early 1990s, the Mirage developers swapped
interests in the land and traded mortgages with each other
in a series of bewildering transactions. Peter Zalewski, a
South Florida condo market analyst, said the sales appeared
to be a common way developers protect themselves if they are
worried about losing their land. “If someone is going to
sue, they’re going to have to sue each particular
corporation,” Zalewski said. “It will be complicated as hell
for a creditor to go through and run down each of these
corporations. It drags everything out.” (The Mirage condo
association faced exactly that problem when it sued over
construction defects years later, one former board member
said. The court records were destroyed after the case was
settled.)
Finally, with the market back on the upswing, the developers
were able to restart construction in 1994, using the
existing pilings and building a 12-story condo tower on top
of the original foundation. The driving partners were
Isadore Goldlist and Blankenstein, according to Jerry
Kaufman, who joined their team as a partner in the early
1990s to handle sales and marketing. Goldlist and
Blankenstein originally branded the project “Richelieu
Towers” — after a character in The Three Musketeers — to
distinguish it from Champlain South and its sister towers,
since Nathan Reiber was not a partner. Other aspects
remained the same: Once again, William Friedman was the
architect, although the engineer and general contractor were
different. Kaufman said he would have preferred another
architect. “Friedman had a relationship with Izzie [Goldlist]
and Abe [Blankenstein]. He was not my choice,” he told the
Herald in an interview. “My choice would have been …
somebody more contemporary.” Friedman’s architectural
license was suspended for six months in the 1960s after sign
pylons at a building he designed collapsed during a
hurricane — something Kaufman said he was not aware of.
(Friedman died in 2018.) Kaufman did make other changes,
however. For instance, the project was renamed Mirage on the
Ocean, to broaden its appeal beyond French-speaking
Canadians. Reiber wasn’t formally involved in the Mirage,
but he still intervened occasionally out of loyalty to his
friends Goldist and Blankenstein. “He’d come into the sales
office from time to time and give me unsolicited advice,”
Kaufman remembered. “Nathan saw pricing as an orange to
squeeze and not a seed to plant. He thought I was being too
soft.” “He was one tough son of a bitch,” Kaufman said.
Where Reiber wore suits and ties, Goldlist and Blankenstein
favored shirtsleeves. “They were quiet, reserved gentlemen,”
said Kaufman, who added that he knew his former partners
would be heartbroken by the disaster at Champlain South.
“Most developers are extremely volatile,” he continued.
“They were humbled by the fact that they were refugees. …
Never did they say to me ‘cut this corner or cut that
corner’ or do anything out of the ordinary, which was
amazing to me. I grew up in the construction business and a
lot of people cut corners.” The Mirage opened in 1995, a
year after Champlain Towers East, which had suffered similar
delays and been taken over by a company registered to Gonda,
one of the original Champlain South partners. For
Blankenstein, the Mirage was a bet that paid off. Risk was
in his nature. In his biography, a friend remembered him as
a passionate gambler. “Las Vegas was his domain. He loved
the action,” the friend said. “He loved pitting himself
against the dealer. The actual amount of money involved was
secondary; the challenge of beating the house was the goal.
And no one ever knew if he won or lost.”
‘THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING’
When Champlain Towers South collapsed, at
least one former Mirage resident connected the dots: Donald
Chapman, a retired architect who lived in the building and
briefly served on the board in the late 1990s. “There’s a
lot of similarities in the buildings. The floor plans are
very similar, a lot of cut and paste from one building to
the next,” Chapman told the Herald. The developers, he said,
appeared to be “tweaking those things as they marched up the
street building one after the other.” The L-shaped design
shared by all four buildings, he observed, was a way of
“squeezing more units onto a relatively narrow site” within
Surfside’s 12-story height limits, while also maximizing
ocean views.
Frank Barreras, who moved to the Mirage in the late 1990s
when the building was five years old, said there were
problems early on: water leaking through the garage onto
cars, balconies rusting, and a “huge crack” that opened up
in the pool deck. “I feel very lucky that I got out of
there,” said Barreras, who no longer lives in Surfside. The
Mirage’s problems have persisted and gotten worse, records
show. An engineer’s 2018 report found “numerous leaks” in
the garage and pool area and substantial problems on the
balconies, including spalling concrete, rusted steel
reinforcement and three broken “post-tension tendons”
sticking out from balcony edges. The Mirage, like Champlain
East, was built using a method called “post-tensioning,”
which strengthens reinforced concrete with steel bars, or
“tendons,” so it can withstand greater loads and accommodate
thinner slabs and longer distances between structural
supports. Champlain South and North are simpler reinforced
concrete structures. Engineers who reviewed the plans said
the pool deck at Champlain South had been cracking since day
one, because the slab was too thin and sagged in the large
spans between columns, placed up to 30 feet apart to
maximize parking space in the basement garage. The damage,
and especially the similarity of the cracking on the pool
deck, documented in 2018 is troubling, especially given the
Mirage’s post-tension construction, said Nair, the
Illinois-based engineer. “The whole point of post-tensioning
is to limit cracks or to prevent them,” he said. The three
broken post-tension tendons potentially indicate serious
structural problems, Nair added. “If there’s any uncertainty
at all about the post-tensioning, that’s a red flag and the
structural engineer should take it very seriously,” he said.
Larry Kibler, the former president of Miller & Solomon
General Contractors, which built the Mirage condo in the
mid-1990s, said that all concrete structures crack —
especially near the ocean — but it’s how condo associations
respond that determines whether it will become a significant
structural problem. “In my opinion, almost everything on
these towers … is all about how they maintain them going
forward,” Kibler said. “Do they do what they’re supposed to
do? Or do they kick the can down road?” The structural
engineer on revised plans for the Mirage in the early 1990s,
Zvonimir Belfranin, told the Herald he doesn’t remember
details of the building’s design, but said the current
problems seemed “fairly typical” for beachfront construction
— though post-tension cables breaking is “always a concern.”
“These are maintenance issues that need to be taken care of
as soon as possible,” he said. But large, deep cracks that
form as a result of flawed design can’t be fixed with
routine maintenance. Experts said the cause of the cracking
at the Mirage is hard to pinpoint without reviewing original
structural plans, the ones the town cannot currently find.
Drawings that are on file with the town of Surfside and
emails from the condo board detail plans to replace drains,
remove planters to lighten the load on the deck, install new
waterproofing and repair numerous cracks, including one that
was 40 feet long. Those fixes — along with a roof
replacement, fire safety repairs and a handful of other
items — were part of a $3 million special assessment on unit
owners. The building’s pool area, upper and lower decks, spa
and cabanas closed in early March 2020 for repairs,
according to an email to residents that estimated the work
would take four months. But the project still isn’t
finished.
As the repairs drag on, some Mirage residents say it has
only become harder to get real answers from the board.
Angela Elizalde Zavala, a longtime Mirage condo owner who
practiced law in Argentina before moving to the United
States in the 1980s, has long fought with the condo
association, which she described as incompetent. “My
impression is that the board, every year, makes this
building worse, period, because they don’t know what they’re
doing,” Zavala told the Herald. One of Zavala’s top
priorities has been documenting the true cost of the
building’s long-standing struggles with fire code issues.
The building has been out of code, documents suggest, since
at least 2016, when engineering consultants inspected the
damper system and found that an attempted replacement had
been botched. Residents interviewed by the Herald said that
the condo association started repairs, but the work has
stalled. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue inspectors visited the
Mirage in 2019, noting that the smoke dampers violated code
and that the association hadn’t properly tested its smoke
control system, according to a report. An MDFR spokesperson
told the Herald that the agency approved a permit for a new
damper installation at the Mirage and “the other violations
remain pending further enforcement.” Gregg Schlesinger, a
Fort Lauderdale general contractor and attorney, said it’s
rare for a building to remain out of fire code for several
years on end. “Fire is one of the most important things in a
building,” Schlesinger said. “You take care of it
immediately.” Gursky, the condo board’s attorney, denied
that the dampers were installed improperly and said the code
violations were related to testing rather than problems with
the fire protection system itself. When sent copies of the
reports documenting the issues, Gursky did not respond. He
contended that the board has been “completely forthcoming
and transparent” about the ongoing repairs, citing
construction updates emailed to residents and regular board
meetings. Condo board troubles, much like corrosion and
saltwater intrusion, are a staple of South Florida’s
beachfront residential buildings. Chapman, the retired
architect, said he moved out of the Mirage in the late 1990s
because of a nasty board fight involving a building manager
who was fired for alleged financial misconduct, then rehired
at the next meeting. “It’s the worst politics in the world,”
Chapman said. “Living here [in the Miami area] is like
living in paradise, except for the condo boards.”
‘THEY NEED TO CHECK EVERY BUILDING’
There are substantive differences between
the Mirage and Champlain Towers South, experts told the
Herald. Those include the structural engineer and general
contractor who brought the project to fruition in the 1990s,
as well as the building’s post-tensioned reinforced concrete
construction. (It’s not clear from available records which
engineering firm worked on the Mirage site in the early
1980s, but the names of an engineer and general contractor
for CTS appear on early permits there.) Abieyuwa Aghayere, a
Drexel University engineering researcher, said limited
architectural drawings appear to show that the Mirage — like
Champlain Towers East — has more robust columns and
better-designed reinforced concrete core walls, known as
shear walls. But engineers said that without reviewing the
Mirage’s complete structural plans and conducting a thorough
investigation, it’s impossible to know whether it might
suffer from the confluence of design, construction and
maintenance flaws that brought down half of Champlain South.
To better judge a building’s structural integrity and
possibly prevent another horrific collapse, engineers should
review original plans, test concrete strength and scan for
proper rebar placement, Aghayere said. Those steps often
aren’t taken — and it’s not clear whether they have happened
at the Mirage.
“Patching the external symptoms of what’s going on does not
prevent the continuance of whatever is going on internally,”
Aghayere said. The town of Surfside hasn’t pressed the issue
beyond recommending below-ground and other structural
testing, guidance that was distributed to all properties
east of Collins Avenue in July. Dauginikas, the town’s
spokesperson, noted that because the Mirage is less than 40
years old, the town has no obligation under current law to
recertify that it’s safe. Allyn Kilsheimer, the engineer the
town hired to investigate the Champlain South collapse, was
directed in July to conduct cursory reviews of several
buildings in Surfside. That included Champlain North — whose
design most closely resembles that of Champlain South — as
well as Champlain East.
But the Mirage was not on the list. Kilsheimer said town
officials informed him recently about its ties to Champlain
South, but told the Herald he believes those ties would be
more significant if the buildings shared a structural
engineer and general contractor. Nonetheless, Kilsheimer
said, if the town directed him to look into the state of the
Mirage, he would. Some residents hope that happens. “They
need to check every building, every property, in the town of
Surfside,” said Ernestina Jeronimides, 81, a longtime Mirage
resident. “This is their job.”