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.
And then, in 1971, the theme parks arrived, and the world's picture of Orlando changed overnight. It brought the crowds, the wonder, and a global fame few cities ever know — a chapter worth celebrating in its own right. But the older greater Orlando never went anywhere. It simply carried on beneath the fame: the swans still glide, the peacocks still roam Winter Park, and Tiffany's rescued light still glows on Park Avenue.
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.
