What survived came south. Hugh and Jeannette McKean — she the granddaughter of Charles Hosmer Morse, the industrialist who had shaped modern Winter Park after becoming its largest landowner in 1904 — drove to the ruins and saved what they could. Jeannette had founded the Morse Gallery of Art in Winter Park in 1942; the rescued Tiffany glass became the heart of what is today the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art on Park Avenue, whose treasures include the Daffodil Terrace and the chapel Tiffany designed for the 1893 World's Fair. The peacocks that strut Winter Park's streets are descendants of the birds the McKeans brought home — a living thread back to Laurelton Hall.
The story belongs to Louis Comfort Tiffany, the jeweler's son who chose colored light over the family name. Between 1902 and 1905, on the North Shore of Long Island at Laurel Hollow near Oyster Bay, Tiffany built Laurelton Hall — an eighty-four-room house he designed down to the last fountain and pane of glass, ringed by gardens above Cold Spring Harbor and crowned by a minaret. He kept peacocks there and threw famous feasts. After his death the estate faltered; its contents were auctioned in 1946, and in 1957 fire gutted the long-abandoned house.
Why People Visit Greater Orlando
The world comes to Orlando for its attractions, but its enduring charm is everything around them: lakes, oaks, swans, and a citrus-country past in the city itself, and a Winter Park two miles north that holds the finest Tiffany glass on earth. Visitors who slow down find gardens, historic downtown streets, lakefront paths, and a rescued palace's worth of colored light — a whole greater Orlando that feels a world away from the crowds.
