The beachfront Eden Roc Hotel is an icon of Miami modernist architecture, a style that epitomizes the post-war glamor and grandeur of Miami Beach. Two turquoise panels wrap the white facade. The oval canister perched atop the building looks like a cruise ship funnel. Crooners such as Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr. stayed and performed there.
But a new Florida law could make it easier to demolish hotels like the Eden Roc and other architectural icons along the Miami Beach coastline.
The battle pits the pressures of development and climate change against the benefits of historic preservation, in a city that has long shed its past and prized the new, bright and shiny.
Supporters say the law addresses the environmental and safety challenges of aging properties after the fatal collapse of the Champlain Towers South housing complex in 2021. But critics say the legislation is a pretext to make it easier to demolish historic buildings — those that are giving Miami Beach its distinctive look – to pave the way for high-rise luxury apartments.
The new law effectively strips the Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board of its longstanding authority to say whether historic structures can be demolished and, if a structure is torn down, to ensure that at least some elements of its design are preserved or replicated.
“Let’s bulldoze the past — that’s their idea,” said Daniel Ciraldo, executive director of the nonprofit Miami Design Preservation League. “I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of attack on our local controls since the 1980s, when the city first started doing historic preservation.”
The legislation, signed last week by Gov. Ron DeSandis, known as the Resilience and Safe Structures Act, was easily passed by both houses of the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature by a vote of 36 to 2. in the Senate and an 86-29 vote in the House.
Allows owners to demolish buildings in high-risk coastal zones if local officials determine the structures are unsafe, if the local government has jurisdiction, or if the buildings do not comply with basic flood elevation requirements set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency Necessity. FEMA). Preservationists warn that few, if any, historic buildings meet current federal agency standards.
The law targets oceanfront buildings along the so-called coastal construction control line, a boundary created to delineate how close developers can build to the shore. In Miami Beach, endangered properties are clustered among the Miami Modernist or MiMo resorts along Collins Avenue in the Mid Beach and North Beach neighborhoods, such as the Faena, Casablanca, Carillon, Sherry Frontenac, Edition hotels, as well as a few art deco buildings in the South-of-Fifth neighborhood, such as the Savoy Hotel;
As sea levels continue to rise around Florida and hurricanes become stronger and more frequent, lawmakers believe local conservation boards have become too powerful at the expense of property owners, necessitating a change in the law.
“Councils have weaponized this process,” said Spencer Roach, the state representative who authored the bill, during a committee hearing last month.
Representative Roach said the maintenance boards required owners to build their properties back to original specifications. “It makes them prohibitively expensive to insure and guarantees that these buildings will be demolished again the next time a storm comes,” added the lawmaker, who represents North Fort Myers, which was hit hard by Hurricane Ian in 2022.
Buildings erected to replace historic structures will be subject to regular zoning laws, rendering the evidence from preservation boards obsolete.
After a 2017 electrical fire at Deauville — a MiMo resort where the Beatles appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964 — the Miami Beach government sued the owners, the Meruelo family, to force renovations. The Meruelos said they didn’t have the money. By 2022, months after the Champlain apartment collapse, the hotel was so badly damaged that a local building official deemed it unsafe and ordered it demolished. The Miami Design Preservation League appealed the building official’s demolition order to the Miami-Dade Board of Rules and Appeals, but a Miami judge upheld the order and the building came down in 2022.
Conservationists fear the new legislation will incentivize other landlords to follow suit.
The architecture helped put Miami Beach on the map as a global destination. The colorful, elegant Art Deco represented a lifeline for the city during the Great Depression. Despite the hard times, some developers still saw an opportunity in Miami Beach’s hospitality, thanks to the city’s reputation for freewheeling hedonism that reigned during Prohibition. With their limited resources, developers built small, two- to three-story hotels, opting for the modern urban aesthetic of the time, which was Art Deco.
After a lull in construction during World War II, the next architectural style to sweep Miami was homegrown: Miami Modernism. Inspired by the boxy, white structures of European modernist architecture and the retro-futuristic aesthetics of mid-century design, MiMo embodied the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Architect Morris Lapidus led the charge, designing large and high-rise resorts, such as the now iconic Fontainebleau and Eden Roc which attracted Hollywood stars.
But in the late 1970s, Miami Beach faced financial problems and developers threatened to tear down old properties. Activists, led by Barbara Baer Capitman, saw historic preservation of the Art Deco and later MiMo buildings as a way to revitalize the city. The renewed attention helped attract artists and designers such as Gianni Versace, who rebranded as a cosmopolitan beach town.
If the preservationists had lost, “Miami Beach would be no different than any other beach resort,” said Robin F. Bachin, a history professor at the University of Miami.
Neither Rep. Roach nor his bill co-sponsor, Florida state Sen. Brian Avila, responded to multiple phone and email requests for comment.
This was the second time lawmakers tried to pass a law. The initial effort failed last year after strong opposition from some local officials and conservationists. This time, the law exempts St. Augustine, Palm Beach, Key West and Miami Beach’s famous stretch of Ocean Drive, which is lined with pastel-colored Art Deco buildings, as well as individual buildings like the Fontainebleau . Hotel.
In recent years, Miami Beach residents have been slow to develop. In November, Miami Beach voters elected a new mayor who promised to “stop overdevelopment.” In 2022 referendums, Miami Beach voters rejected two proposals to redevelop city-owned properties into offices and mixed-use, as well as the project to replace the Deauville Hotel designed by architect Frank Gehry.
The tug and pull between construction and maintenance is nothing new for Miami Beach, a city that has long been fueled by shows and real estate speculators. “It was capitalism that created South Beach in the ’30s,” said Keith D. Revell, a professor of public administration at Florida International University whose research focuses on South Beach’s redevelopment.
And then “the conservation movement came along and said ‘This isn’t just real estate. They are historic, valuable — we have to recognize that.”