Lake Eola and the Swans, The Park at the Heart of the City

At the center of downtown Orlando, in a landscape defined by convention hotels and sports arenas and the endless commercial churn of a city that never quite stops growing, Lake Eola sits like something left over from an older Florida. The lake is a sinkhole, formed when the limestone beneath the sandhill dissolved and the surface dropped into the void. It holds about twenty-three acres of water, nearly circular, with a bandshell fountain at its center that illuminates in color at night and has become the emblem on every Orlando visitor's photograph.

The swans came later, a civic decision in the early twentieth century to populate the lake with mute swans as a kind of ornamental statement. Orlando had seen enough mud and heat and raw commercial ambition. A swan on the water said something different.

Over the decades the flock has been maintained by the city, and the swans have become so identified with the lake that Orlando issues them official identification cards, a local joke that became a genuine civic tradition. Eola Park was informally established in eighteen eighty-eight, officially declared a park in eighteen ninety-two, and developed through the Works Progress Administration in the nineteen thirties, which added the fountain, the walking path, and the bandshell. On Sunday mornings the path around the lake fills with people who appear to be simply walking a circle, which is what cities have always needed and too rarely built: a place to be somewhere without going anywhere in particular.