Winter Park: Two Sides of the Tracks

Park Avenue at Central Park

The gracious main street of a town platted in 1881 by two New Englanders who dreamed of a winter colony in the Florida sun.

You are standing at the civic heart of Winter Park, a town that two men from Massachusetts drew on paper in 1881 before a single brick was laid. Loring Chase and Oliver Chapman bought six hundred acres of scrub and lakefront for thirteen thousand dollars, then hired a civil engineer to plat a proper New England village around a central green. That green is the park on your left. The street under your feet is Park Avenue.

The founders wanted a place where wealthy northern families could spend the winter, and they marketed it that way: a town named for the season and its central park, served by a railroad that deposited guests steps from the hotels. The New York Times called it 'a bright New England town in Central Florida' in 1896. Look down Park Avenue. The commercial buildings facing the park date from several eras, a few from the 1880s, many from the 1920s land boom, some from the mid-century.

The whole stretch was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011. Charles Hosmer Morse, the Chicago industrialist who wintered here, deeded the park itself to the city in 1906 with one condition: it must remain open and undeveloped forever. When you are ready, turn north on Park Avenue and walk toward the museum that bears Morse's name. It is three blocks ahead on your right.

Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art

Home to the world's most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany's work, rescued from his burned Long Island estate in 1957.

This museum holds more Tiffany glass than any place on earth, and the story of how it got here begins with a fire. In 1957, Louis Comfort Tiffany's Long Island mansion, Laurelton Hall, burned. His daughter called Hugh and Jeannette McKean. Hugh had studied at Laurelton Hall as a young artist.

Jeannette had just curated one of the first Tiffany exhibitions in decades at a small gallery she ran on the Rollins College campus, a gallery named for her grandfather, Charles Hosmer Morse. The McKeans drove to Long Island, bought the unwanted windows and architectural fragments, and brought them to Winter Park. For years, much of it sat in crates while they tracked down chapel furnishings scattered after Tiffany's death. In 1999, the museum reassembled the chapel Tiffany built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

It had not been seen complete since that fair closed. Inside are lamps, jewelry, mosaics, Favrile glass, paintings, and room after room of leaded windows. About a quarter of the collection is on view at any time. The museum does not crowd the walls with labels.

It wants you to walk through and simply look. The building opened on this site in 1995 with nineteen thousand square feet of gallery space, all of it built to house the obsession of two people who understood what Tiffany had made before the rest of the world caught up.