A City Built on Water

Lakeland is not named for a single lake. It is named for the improbable abundance of them. Within the city limits today there are thirty-eight named lakes, ranging from Lake Blanton at two and a half acres to Lake Parker at more than twenty-two hundred. If you add the unnamed water bodies, most of them old phosphate pits that filled over decades, the number grows considerably larger. No other city in Florida of comparable size is so thoroughly threaded through with fresh water.

The lakes exist because of Central Florida's karst geology. Beneath the sandy soil, the limestone bedrock is riddled with cavities, and where those cavities collapse, sinkholes form. Over centuries, sinkholes become lakes. The subtropical rainfall, averaging close to fifty-seven inches per year, keeps them full. The result is a landscape where residents navigate by water rather than by street names. Ask for directions in Lakeland and someone will tell you to turn left at the lake.

The lakes shaped everything. The city's founders built the downtown along Lake Mirror because flat water calmed the early tourists arriving by train. The twenty-dollar description of the place in every real estate circular from the eighteen eighties mentioned the lakes before it mentioned the climate. Florida Southern College pressed its campus against Lake Hollingsworth. Neighborhoods organized themselves around lakefronts. The city's character is fundamentally shaped by the fact that the builders of the place could never entirely forget that water was everywhere.

Today the city manages its lake system as a public trust, maintaining water quality, monitoring blue-green algae blooms in summer, and keeping many of the shorelines accessible to the public. The system of thirty-eight named lakes is an accident of geology that the city has spent one hundred forty years learning to live with. So far, the arrangement has worked out for everyone.