Our Orlando logo carries Florida's alligator over "Florida Territory · Est. 1845," the year Florida joined the Union — the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics Florida place. Printed black-and-white with the worn look of an old citrus-crate stamp, the gator reads as wild Florida in shorthand: tough, sun-baked, and unmistakably of the place. What makes this one Orlando is the country behind it — Lake Eola, the swans, the orange groves of the City Beautiful, and the whole rich metro that surrounds it, from Winter Park's Tiffany glass to the theme parks that made the name famous.
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.
