Someone, or some people, purposely torched the Collins Park Hotel. Photo by Angie Hargot.

At the site of the fire, the building is still a charred shell of the Art Deco icon it once was.

Since the daylong fire on Feb. 22, the former Collins Park Hotel at 20th Street and Park Avenue, constructed in 1939, has repeatedly been called an Art Deco “gem,” a cliché hardly true in recent years, as evidence continues to filter in that the building, now condemned, had grown increasingly dilapidated.

On a sunny afternoon last Friday, the property smells of urine and seawater. Piles of recently abandoned clothes are strewn about the grounds, and fresh graffiti decorates many of the remaining walls. New sheets of plywood have been bolted over a few of the structure’s many windows. Several of the surrounding buildings, also boarded up, are equally forsaken: vacant, graffiti-targeted and littered with the paraphernalia of the dispossessed.

A red plastic gas can sits on a short ledge in the front yard of the ruins. The contrast of the blackened concrete against the silhouette of the bright blue sky looks ironically, well, pretty. Across the street, a small old man tests the strength of a chain securing to a pole a mountain bike that just so happens to belong to this reporter. Startled by its owner, he scampers away into a neighboring building.

Such was the environment of the recently proclaimed Cultural Arts Neighborhood District Overlay, or CANDO, which Miami Beach Mayor David Dermer hopes will eventually provide a place for artists, musicians and “cultural workers” to live and work. (Already New World Symphony houses its student musicians in a hotel within the district.)

A report released Friday, April 27, confirmed the suspicions of neighboring residents and investigators alike that the fire that raged through the building two months ago was purposely set — arson.

In a short interview, the building’s owner, G-2 Development Director Shane Rolls, said he has not been interviewed by police as a suspect, and confirmed that he does own the building, which was reported to be in receivership to BSG Development Corp. president and CANDO committee member Ron Bloomberg. Bloomberg has told the SunPost he has the building under contract.

“I own the building,” Rolls said. “My lender went into bankruptcy, that’s what happened.”

When asked who he thought caused the fire, Rolls replied, “They told me either homeless people or high school kids.” Rolls would not clarify who “they” were.

The arson report noted, “Of 18 samples submitted to the state lab, five came back positive for gasoline.” The report lists a host of evidence collected at the scene, included various samples of wood and burned debris, fabric, a golf tee and a lighter.

No ignitable liquid was found in two evidence entries: “fire debris, possibly part of a long sleeve jacket” and “fire debris from where shirt/sleeve was found,” originally suspected to belong to a fleeing perpetrator.

Miami Beach Fire Department Support Services Chief Javier Otero says the investigation is now in the hands of the Police Department. The Fire Department’s role is to determine if the fire “was … incendiary or not, meaning it was not an accident, that there was an intention” for the inferno to start, he said.

The Fire Department determined there was that intention. The search for those responsible, Otero says, is now up to the cops.

Are there any suspects? “I’ve heard that there [are],” Otero said, but couldn’t confirm that since his department is no longer investigating.

 Lt. Joseph Schwartz of the State Fire Marshal’s Office said although his Plantation office was not considered the lead investigator in the search, “there’s still an open case” with his organization and the Miami Beach Police Department.

“We determine cause and origin [how the fire started],” Schwartz said.

Schwartz said gas cans were found on the property, which his office’s investigation determined to be benign as far as evidence goes. “They weren’t relevant to the case,” he said. “There were people working there — the building was under renovation.”

He could not confirm or deny any leads or suspects in the case.

“At this time ‘suspect’ is a strong word,” he said. “There are people of interest,” including lawn care workers and others at the scene, he said.

Police have confirmed there are witnesses to activity leading up to the blaze that took down the three-story building, but remain tight-lipped about those and other details surrounding the case, though they do admit there is evidence of possible juvenile involvement. That is “one of the several avenues being investigated,” Sgt. Bobby Hernandez, spokesperson for the Miami Beach Police Department, said.

Hernandez said the possible motives for setting the fire are “limitless — profit, revenge, mental illness, peer pressure.” As for the criminal charges facing the responsible individual, it “depends on intent.”

Hernandez said the building’s insurance policies and benefits are also being investigated by state agencies.

Hernandez also revealed that the sprinkler system, which previous owner and former Miami Beach Commissioner David T. Pearlson confirmed to the SunPost he had voluntarily installed to protect the historical building, had been purposely disabled. That sprinkler system in the under-renovation building had become rusted, according to the report, and had been disabled “after several citations for a faulty system and false alarms. [The] system was being rebuilt,” Hernandez said.

Although several neighbors reported in the days after the fire that the building was being used as a crack house, Hernandez said the investigation has uncovered no evidence of drug activity in the building.

Although the report from the state fire marshal indicates there were several areas of ‘origin’ in the building, as gasoline was found on several floors and in various rooms, Hernandez would not confirm that the evidence leads to any conclusions about the perpetrator’s intent. Such information could “compromise the investigation,” he said. He did confirm that a lighter found inside the building might possibly have been used to spark the blaze.

Hernandez said investigators have re-created a scenario “for the spread of the fire,” but “only partially on events leading up to it.” He would not comment on whether fingerprints or other human evidence had been recovered.

Time will tell the fate of the building as it now stands, according to Nannette Rodriguez, public information officer for Miami Beach. The building has now received multiple violations for being structurally unsafe and currently unsupported. The “engineer of record, Herb Gopman, P.E., has submitted a report to the chief building official, who has yet to make a decision,” Rodriguez said, on what will replace the condemned building. The Historic Preservation Board could determine it must be rebuilt.

Meanwhile, two agencies are offering rewards for information regarding the Collins Park Hotel fire: $2,500 through the State Fire Marshal’s Office (1-877-NOARSON) and $1,000 from Crime Stoppers (305-471-TIPS).