Winter Park itself is the older, quieter Orlando: Park Avenue's brick shops and sidewalk cafés, Rollins College on Lake Virginia, Central Park under its oaks, and a scenic boat tour that threads a chain of lakes past lakeshore gardens. It was built as a winter resort in the 1880s by New Englanders who named the streets for the states they left, and it has kept that graceful, tree-shaded calm ever since — two miles and a world away from the theme parks.
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.
