What's with everyone expecting Disney? Say "Orlando" and most people picture the theme parks — and that is genuinely part of the fun. But the parks are the newest chapter of a much richer place. Greater Orlando was drawing presidents, world-class art, and Florida's first four-year college long before the castles ever lit up, and the best surprise of all sits just two miles north of downtown, in a separate little city called Winter Park. Start the story there and it only gets better — a lost palace, rescued treasure, and a whole quieter Orlando most visitors never plan for.
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.
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.
