SW Dade Man Heartbroken Over Demolition Of "One Of A Kind" Home
MIAMI (CBS4) - A home that's stood for decades in a Southwest Miami-Dade neighborhood is a pile of rubble.
Neighbors say a developer tore down the home on Snapper Creek Drive and will build several more in its place, but some call the demolition heartbreaking.
The house at 6491 Snapper Creek Drive is just outside the city limits of South Miami. Bob Beckerich says the house was built about 1920, but it burned and was rebuilt in 1947. He lived in the home with his wife Madell for nearly 40 years.
"My wife bought the house in December of 1968," he said. "She named it immediately 'Castle Madell."
Although Madell died in 2003 and Beckerich remarried, he still lives down the street and comes to the house every day to feed the cats that live nearby. Thursday instead of his home he saw bulldozers and rubble.
"Unbelievable," he said looking at the rubble. "Unbelievable."
Beckerich still called the house "Castle Madell even after he sold it to Linda Murphy.
"It was this beautiful coral rock house that I've seen nothing like it in Dade County, period," said Linda Murphy.
She says she offered the house to the City of South Miami to become part of a park named for her son who died of cancer, but that didn't work out and a few years later she sold it.
She says the buyer closed on the house Wednesday.
The bulldozers tore the house down Thursday.
