VENICE − When visitors stepped into Bela Urban’s house on Golden Beach Boulevard in Venice, they called it a museum.
The native Hungarian had lived in the house a short walk from the Gulf of Mexico since 2002, and he filled it with one-of-a-kind furniture pieces from across the word. Portraits, pictures and his late wife’s needlepoint creations lined the walls. Beyond a price, Urban said, and irreplaceable.
By Thursday night, with Hurricane Helene’s fierce winds driving the sea toward Florida’s Gulf shoreline, the furniture was underwater. And now, the pieces are piled on the curb outside his house — ruined and ready for waste management to collect them. Some of the framed works survived, but others were lost to the water…