The site where Champlain Towers once stood in Surfside is still vacant.
Construction on a new luxury condo has not yet started, but the town is about to build a permanent memorial to the victims adjacent to the site. However, the project is now shrouded in controversy.
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“What they’re trying to do is erase what happened on that night,” said Martin Langesfeld, who has been a leader in the fight to establish an on-site memorial for five years.
“This is extremely frustrating,” added Raquel Oliveira, another member of the Memorial Committee established by the town.
Frustrating, she says, because the town commission voted to make major changes to the memorial without consulting the Memorial Committee. They feel blindsided. The previously approved design featured an image of the collapsed building behind a waterfall. The new design has an image of clasped hands instead.
“The new memorial mentions the names of the victims but not what happened on that land and why there’s 98 names on that wall,” said Langesfeld, who lost his sister and brother-in-law when the building collapsed five years ago.
Oliveira lost her husband and 5-year-old son. I asked her if she felt the redesign sanitizes what happened.
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“Totally, now it’s a park that mentions the 98 names, and that’s it,” she said.
Debris from the building was supposed to be incorporated into the memorial, but the commission decided that, and the images of the ruined building, were too painful.
“The image of the building is very shocking? That’s what happened there. A memorial is a museum, it’s a place for reflection, it’s a place to tell the story,” Oliveira said.
Surfside mayor Shlomo Danziger sent us a statement, saying in part, “The Commission’s decision reflects what this community asked for. The image of hands, representing love, family, and continuity, was the symbolic design originally approved by the Memorial Committee back in 2022… This memorial is meant to honor those we lost with dignity, not to reopen wounds each time someone walks by.”
“What’s painful is having to visit my sister in her grave, and 98 others having passed away on that night,” Langesfeld said.
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