By Jane Smith
When barrier island homeowner Michael Marco next appears before the Delray Beach Historic Preservation Board, he will have to convince the members that demolition — followed by reconstruction — is allowed on his historic house at 212 Seabreeze Ave.
After a four-hour-plus special magistrate hearing on Feb. 24, Marco was cited for failing to obtain a demolition permit. The magistrate said he would wait to determine the amount of the fine until after Marco appears again before the preservation board.
On April 27, the city confirmed that Marco is paying $10,000 for a fast-track review of his plans for the house. The money covers the review by an outside architect and city administrative costs. This process is available to any homeowner or developer, said city spokeswoman Gina Carter. All that remains of the historic Sewell C. Biggs house is the steel skeleton.
The 1955 house was designed by Paul Rudolph, the father of the Sarasota School of Architecture style who later became dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Biggs was the house’s original owner and commissioned Rudolph to design it.
The city’s chief building officer shut down the job site on Aug. 5 because more than 25% of the house had been removed. Marco was cited on Sept. 20 for failing to obtain a demolition permit. He contested the citation, sending a decision to the special magistrate.
By the time of the special magistrate hearing in February, tensions were high between the city staff and Marco’s team.
“The actions are irreversible and irreparable,” Michelle Hoyland, the city’s preservation planner, said at the hearing. She found out about the destruction in early August when talking with another applicant, not from a phone call or email from Marco or his contractor.
The city’s hired expert, architect Richard J. Heisenbottle, agreed. “The construction drawings did not show the demolition plans, just showed the proposed plans,” he said at the Feb. 24 hearing. “No one can wave a magic wand and make the original home in the earlier photograph reappear.”
Heisenbottle, of Coral Gables, has been hired by the city in the past on preservation matters and is heading the restoration work on the historic Seaboard Air Line train station.
Delray Beach paid Heisenbottle $10,000 to review all documents about the Biggs house since its local historic designation in June 2005. Heisenbottle said the Rudolph-designed house could continue to be listed on the city’s register of historic places if the contractor followed the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s guidelines for reconstructing historic buildings.
“It would be appropriate for the board to review the property’s individual listing on the Local Register of Historic Places following the reconstruction — if approved,” Carter wrote in an email to The Coastal Star. “This would give the board an opportunity to review the completed project to ensure it was executed according to plan.”
Others, though, say it cannot remain because too much of the original design has been removed. Doing so would set a precedent for owners of other historic homes.
John Miller, who has chaired the Historic Preservation Board in two separate stints, said, “Technically, they can go to the board and ask for retroactive approval. I don’t think they will get it.”
Miller, a Delray native, is president of the city Historical Society board. His great-grandfather and grandfather were Delray Beach mayors.
He does not see how the Rudolph-designed house can stay on the city’s register of historic places. “It’s a replica, not the original,” Miller said.
That’s also the reason that Kelly Barrette, vice president of the Delray Beach Preservation Trust, does not think the house can stay on the local register.
“It’s not really preservation. It’s just an homage to the architect,” said Barrette, who lives near the house and walks by it daily with her dog.
For Kelvin Dickinson, the chief executive of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation in New York, reconstructing the house to meet today’s building codes and hoping to call it a Rudolph design is wrong.
New homeowners would be assuming they know how Rudolph would react to today’s construction issues. That’s not possible, Dickinson said.
For that reason, the foundation’s website states: “The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation will not support such a rebuilding as an authentic Rudolph design. … The original residence will remain ‘demolished’ in our project list.”
Marco, though, sees it as a “fundamental philosophical difference with purists who want to restore a home to a museum where no one lives. No one wants to live in a structure that is not up to code and unsafe.”
In an April 14 telephone interview, Marco insisted the reconstruction is justified for his historic home, as Heisenbottle, the city’s expert architect, said at the Feb. 24 hearing.
If the Rudolph house stays on the local register, Marco can get property tax abatements on the improvement costs for 10 years.
His plans called for restoring the entrance on Vista Del Mar Drive, and he received Historic Preservation Board approval to add a 5-foot-deep swimming pool in front of the house. He also demolished the non-historic additions, designed by the late Delray Beach architect Bob Currie.
Rudolph designed the house as a two-story structure with an open living space on the ground floor. Marco wants to enclose that ground-level space in glass.
The second floor was not air-conditioned, relying on glass panels and louvers to allow breezes to cool the interior.
Marco’s contractor removed the old glass and louvers as part of the demolition. “That is 100% of the Seabreeze side and 80% of the Vista Del Mar side,” Marco said.
The east and west sides had tongue and groove wood siding that was completely rotted, Marco said. The siding had to be discarded.
Soon after paying $1.4 million for the Rudolph house in February 2018, Marco wanted to change it. In July 2018, he went before the Historic Preservation Board and said there was no need for a demolition plan. But on an Aug. 27 site visit last year, Heisenbottle found the steel frame and the second-floor framing as the only features being preserved and restored. Everything else is being replicated.
The proposed work should have been done to preserve and restore the original defining characteristics of the house, according to Heisenbottle’s Sept. 15 letter to the city.
Marco came to the Feb. 24 special magistrate hearing with his attorney, Michael Weiner, and his expert architect, Roger Cope. They all said the construction plans submitted to the city indicated what they intended to do with the historic Rudolph house.
“My client informed the city and the board through his plans that he was removing four sides,” Weiner said. “When you carry out the plans for a Rudolph house, this is what happens.”
In mid-April, Marco said, “The city calls it a demolition. I call it reconstruction.”
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