The Meaning of Controversy? It’s 42.
The Battle of 42nd Street Continues at Beach Design Review Board

“If you let the cat out of the bag, you’re never going to get it back in.”

By Angie Hargot

It was a battle of the architects. Two attorneys faced off. Board members were accused of being on the take. A lawyer may have insulted the disabled. The entire profession of traffic engineering was discredited. Puns were crafted. And a mid-Beach resident called a proposed residential plan a monster — twice.

And then, in the wake of all the deliberation at Tuesday’s meeting, the Miami Beach Design Review Board decided to continue the controversial seven-story, 42-unit townhouse project at 4120 Pine Tree Drive and 340 W. 42nd St. to the board’s April 5 meeting.

DRB members, concerned with the objections of neighboring homeowners, and generally displeased with the design of the proposed building, gave little leeway to attorney Carter McDowell, representing CABI 301, the project’s developers. The 50,000-square-foot project was described by miscellaneous board members as looking “like a big rectangle,” and containing architectural elements reminiscent of “pancakes.”

But the project is well within code requirements and actually faces only one residential property, McDowell says. The existing site has a 75-foot height restriction and is zoned to allow commercial uses. McDowell, as he did before the city’s Planning Board, reminded DRB members that the owners “could build a 7-Eleven there.” A conditional use permit project, currently not requesting any variances from the city, was passed by the Planning board on Feb. 27.

Some of the same residents from that board meeting, many of them from the Orchard Park neighborhood, were on-hand to speak out before the DRB against the general “massing,” or size, of the project.

Nick Spill, a private investigator who lives near the site where CABI 301 wants to build, referenced a development metaphor from an earlier item on the board’s agenda. “If you let the cat out of the bag, you’re never going to get it back in,” he said.

Author and neighbor Mark Derr described the project, along with residential building Tower 41 and the parking garage adjacent to the site, as creating “the great wall of Orchard Park.”

Much of the consternation revolves around residents’ fears of a traffic debacle in their neighborhood. McDowell attempted to ease those concerns by referencing two traffic studies that have been conducted on the project, both of which, according to McDowell, say traffic won’t be a problem.

“Have you ever received a traffic report from a company in South Florida that said traffic would be a problem for a project?” board member Michael Steffens asked. “I don’t take traffic engineers’ word for anything anymore.”

Joaquin Vargas, traffic engineer for Traf Tech Engineering, Inc., which conducted the private study, looked on from the sidelines.

Attorney Henry Lowenstein spoke out against the project, asking for something “a little bit smaller, a little bit more creative.” He said the neighborhood had become “the architectural dumping ground of Miami Beach.”

Residents produced their own architect, Gordon Loader, who contributed his own software presentation on the design shortfalls of the project.

It “seems disconnected. There’s no small-scale residential feel. It’s such a contrast to the neighborhood,” board member Gabrielle Redfern agreed. “Go back and look at how this [project] could be a big brother in the neighborhood rather than a different species of animal,” Redfern told McDowell.

With that, the architect was literally sent back to the drawing board to try and adjust the designs to suit the board’s wishes, including what staff called a “landscaping-happy median,” and changing the look of the top half of the building to better match the two bottom floors of townhomes.

Redfern also wanted more time to “digest” the massive packet McDowell presented to board members at the meeting. The packets, about three inches thick and bound in a solid black cover, contained a lot of good stuff, like traffic studies proving the project would not impose upon its neighbors, according to McDowell. But they sat largely undigested by board members throughout the meeting.

Redfern also instructed McDowell to go back to the diplomacy drawing board and have “additional conversations with neighbors to come to some understanding.”

Comments? E-mail angie@miamisunpost.com.