Winter Park and Rollins, A College Town Built for the North
Near Orlando, Florida
In the eighteen eighties, a group of New England investors decided that if northern people were going to winter in Central Florida, they deserved a town worthy of them. They platted Winter Park on a chain of lakes north of Orlando, laid out wide brick streets shaded by live oaks, built houses in the Queen Anne and Craftsman styles popular in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and in eighteen eighty-five founded Rollins College, the oldest recognized college in Florida, on a campus at the edge of Lake Virginia. The result was a self-conscious enclave: orderly, educated, and northern in its cultural assumptions in a way that set it apart from the rough agricultural towns nearby.
Park Avenue, Winter Park's main commercial street, was designed from the beginning to be a promenade, a place where people of a certain class could stroll and be seen. It remains today one of the few walkable main-street corridors in the Orlando metro. Rollins College became, over its first decades, a genuine liberal arts institution with an unusual emphasis on discussion-based learning and an aesthetics-conscious campus design.
The French Renaissance and Mission-Revival buildings along the lake front were built to look like a place where the life of the mind was taken seriously. The Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, founded in nineteen forty-two by Jeannette Genius McKean and named for her grandfather, the Chicago industrialist Charles Morse, today holds the most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany's work anywhere, including the Tiffany chapel that he built for the eighteen ninety-three World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The McKeans rescued the chapel's pieces after a fire at Tiffany's Long Island estate and brought them here, to a small Florida town that had always understood itself as a repository for beautiful things.
