Winter Park Magazine Spring 2018

Got the Blues Kathleen Denis

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CONTENTS SPRING 2018

FEATURES 24 | FORMS OF ART Barbara Sorensen finds inspiration in nature and at the hardware store. By Randy Noles with Laura Stewart 40 | CUTE AND COZY This historic west side cottage was a sure bet to be torn down. But Evelyn Kelly had other ideas.

By Randy Noles, photographs by Rafael Tongol 52 | MORAL CAPITALIST In the aftermath of reconstruction,Winter Park pioneer Lewis Lawrence brought his crusading spirit south. By Scot French 70 | A SAINTLY LEGACY He preached a message of inherent worth and unconditional lovability. By Jonathan Merritt 76 | HELLO, SPRING Hannibal Square is the setting for the season’s latest looks. Photographs by Rafael Tongol, styling by Marianne Ilunga, makeup and hair by Elsie Knab

6 WIN T E R P A R K M A G A ZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

DEPARTMENTS BUSINESS 14 | THE BRITISH INVASION U.K. visitors experiencing sensory overload at the theme parks are finding a welcome reprieve in Winter Park, where civility reigns.

By Randy Noles DINING 82 | GOOD FOOD, HONESTLY As Luke’s celebrates its first year, the Maitland eatery is finding its stride with creatively comforting fare prepared by perfectionists.

By Rona Gindin, photographs by Rafael Tongol

IN EVERY ISSUE 8 | FIRST WORD 12 | COVER ARTIST 90 | EVENTS 104 | ARTSBEAT

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FIRST WORD

SELECTING THE

INFLUENTIALS

F

MARGIN FOR ERROR In the Winter issue of Winter Park Magazine, our fashion feature was shot on Park Avenue and with an opening spread showing model Joy Harris and Herman Baker of Baker Shoe Shine Service. Unfortunately, Baker’s face was partially obscured by bindery — a fact that was pointed out to us by several of his customers.

We should have cropped the photo in a way that would have avoided this, and apologize for the error. Above is the photograph as it should have been seen.

8 WIN T E R P A R K M A G A ZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

or the past three years, Winter Park Magazine has published compilations of the city’s Most Influential People. Surely by now we’ve recognized everyone deserving of attention, right?

Not even close. In a city filled with achievers — many of whom are passionately involved in civic affairs — there remains no shortage of worthy contenders.

So, this very special — and much-discussed — feature is coming again in our summer issue. As usual, we’re asking past selectees for nominations. In addition, we’re asking our readers for their opinions and putting out a call on social media.

I enjoy the Most Influential People project because it always results in a mixture of mover-and-shaker types with people you may not yet know — but who quietly make a difference.

The list has included businesspeople, clergypeople, professors, politicians, philanthropists, city employees, arts administrators, volunteers, community activists and Winter Parkers from all walks of life.

Even if they’ve agreed on little else, the selectees have shared a love for Winter Park. Indeed, one reason that 32789 is the most interesting zip code in Central Florida is because of its people. There’s a story worth telling at just about every address.

So, who in Winter Park is exceptional in your opinion? Who has done — and continues to do — things that make the city a better place? Who impacts the lives of our residents? I’d like to hear from you.

Past selectees have included (in alphabetical order): Jim Barnes, Dan Bellows, Rita Bornstein, Jeffrey Blydenburgh, Daniel Butts, Grant and Peg Cornwell, Julian Chambliss, Patrick Chapin, Carolyn Cooper, Linda Costa, Mary Daniels, Jeff Eisenbarth, Sue Foreman, Scot French and Christine Madrid French, Betsy Gardner Eckbert, Shawn Garvey, Hal George, John Gill, Steve Goldman and Sarah Grafton.

Also: Jane Hames, Jill Hamilton Buss, Ena Heller, Debra Hendrickson, Catherine Hinman, Herb Holm, Jon and Betsy Hughes, Phil Kean, Allan Keen, Linda Keen, Randy Knight, Debbie Komanski, Linda Kulmann, Cindy Bowman Lafronz, Steve Leary, Lambrine Macejewski, Andrea Massey-Farrell, Brandon McGlamery, Anne Mooney, Ronnie Moore, Patty Maddox, Micki Meyer and Johnny Miller.

And, rounding out the roster: David Odahowski, Betsy Rogers Owens, Jana Ricci, Randy Robertson, John Rife, Peter Schreyer, Polly Seymour, Thad Seymour, Shawn Shaffer, John and Gail Sinclair, Susan Skolfield, Sarah Sprinkel, Sam Stark, Chuck Steinmetz and Margery Pabst Steinmetz, Dori Stone, Fr. Richard Walsh, Jennifer Wandersleben, Harold Ward, Bill Weir, Pete Weldon, Chip Weston and Becky Wilson.

Those folks, of course, aren’t eligible again — but everyone else in this city of 30,000 is. Also eligible are people who don’t live in Winter Park, but whose activities impact the city and its residents in a notable way.

Please send me a brief email sharing who you believe belongs on this year’s list — maybe consider an “unsung hero” who doesn’t get the kudos that he or she deserves. In the email, please explain briefly why that person (or persons) ought to be recognized.

We’ll have a big blowout in July — as we have for the past three years — celebrating the selectees and the city that they help to make such a special place. Please let me hear from you. My email is: randyn@ winterparkpublishing.com.

Randy Noles CEO/Editor/Publisher randyn@winterparkpublishing.com

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CAROLYN EDMUNDS | Art Director RAFAEL TONGOL | Photographer DON SONDAG, JIM ZAHNISER | Artist/Illustrator RONA GINDIN | Dining Editor MARIANNE ILUNGA | Fashion Editor MARIANNE POPKINS, NED POPKINS, HARRY WESSEL | Contributing Editors SCOT FRENCH, MICHAEL MCLEOD, JONATHAN MERRITT, LAURA STEWART | Contributing Writers

WINTER PARK PUBLISHING COMPANY LLC RANDY NOLES | Chief Executive Officer ALLAN E. KEEN | Chairman, Board of Managers JIM DESIMONE | Vice Chairman, Board of Managers THERESA SWANSON | Vice Chairman, Board of Managers RICK WALSH | Member, Board of Managers MICHAEL OKATY, ESQ. | General Counsel, Foley & Lardner LLP

COMMUNITY PARTNERS Larry and Joanne Adams; The Albertson Company, Ltd.; Richard O. Baldwin Jr.; Jim and Diana Barnes; Brad Blum; Ken and Ruth Bradley; John and Dede Caron; Bruce Douglas; Steve Goldman; Hal George; Michael Gonick; Micky Grindstaff; Marc Hagle; Larry and Jane Hames; Eric and Diane Holm; Garry and Isis Jones; Allan E. and Linda S. Keen; Knob Hill Group (Rick and Trish Walsh, Jim and Beth DeSimone, Chris Schmidt); FAN Fund; Kevin and Jacqueline Maddron; Drew and Paula Madsen; Kenneth J. Meister; Ann Hicks Murrah; Jack Myers; Michael P. O’Donnell; Nicole and Mike Okaty; Bill and Jody Orosz; Martin and Ellen Prague; Serge and Kerri Rivera; Theresa Swanson, LLC; Sam and Heather Stark; Randall B. Robertson; George Sprinkel; Philip Tiedtke; Roger K. Thompson; Ed Timberlake; Harold and Libby Ward; Warren “Chip” Weston; Tom and Penny Yochum; and Victor and Jackie A. Zollo.

Copyright 2017 by Winter Park Publishing Company LLC. All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited without written permission of the copyright holder.

Winter Park Magazine is published four times yearly by Winter Park Publishing Company LLC, 201 West Canton Avenue, Suite 125B, Winter Park, Florida 32789.

FOR GENERAL INFORMATION, CALL: 407-647-0225 For advertising information, call: Kathy Byrd, 407-399-7111; Theresa Swanson, 407-448-8414; or Heather Stark, 407-616-3677

Like us on Facebook or visit us online at winterparkmag.com

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ABOUT THE COVER

QUIET, COMFORTING, COLORFUL “IMAGINE BEING THERE,” SAYS PLEIN AIR ARTIST KATHLEEN DENIS.

P

Kathleen Denis hopes her work “causes people to reflect on God’s beauty and creation.”

lein air artist Kathleen Denis loves to paint seemingly innocuous places and things that exude a sense of welcome and comfort. A small cottage, a breezy front porch — even a wooden deck chair placed among the foliage along Lake Maitland.

On the cover of this issue of Winter Park Magazine is Got the Blues, the focal point of which is a bright blue chair that Denis noticed during the 2017 Winter Park Paint Out, held at the Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens. The chair was located in the gardens behind the museum.

This year’s Paint Out — during which 25 invited artists roam throughout the city and capture what they see in oils, watercolors and pastels — is slated for April 22-28. And Denis, who lives in the Florida Keys, will be there for the fifth year in a row.

“What I always think about when painting is, ‘imagine being there,’” says Denis. “I look for things that make people comfy. I also hope my work causes people to reflect on God’s beauty and creation.”

Denis, whose husband, Jeff, is a pastor at Calvary Chapel in the Keys, says that she’s particularly attracted to quaint small towns. “That’s one of the reasons I love to come to Winter Park,” she says.

Although she enjoyed a successful career as a graphic artist — she earned her undergraduate degree in graphic arts from the University of Miami — Denis has concentrated exclusively on fine art for seven years. She paints with oils in a contemporary impressionistic style, using vivid colors.

Denis was recently a featured artist in Plein Air Magazine, and received the magazine’s Best Plein Air Award during its 2016 PleinAir Salon competition.

Visit kathleendenis.com to see more of Denis’s work. Or watch her create in person at the Paint Out. The Polasek is open free to the public throughout the event, during which completed paintings will be hung in the gallery’s “wet room” and made available for sale. For more information on the event, visit polasek.org.

— Randy Noles

Your REALTOR for generations

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BUSINESS

The City of Culture and Heritage is becoming increasingly popular with U.K. vacationers, according to the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce, which is implementing programs specifically to entice visitors from across the pond.

THE BRITISH INVASION U.K. visitors experiencing sensory overload at the theme parks are finding a welcome reprieve in Winter Park, where civility reigns.

BY RANDY NOLES

14 WI N T E R P A R K M A G A ZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

I

t should come as no surprise that Orlando continues to break tourism records. But if you rarely leave the confines of Winter Park, you may believe that only the perpetual hot spots around the attractions and International Drive are impacted.

But maybe you’re not looking closely enough. Tourists are in Winter Park, alright — dining in our restaurants, shopping in our retail stores and wandering through our museums.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, the aptly dubbed City of Culture and Heritage is becoming an increasingly popular draw for visitors from the U.K., according to anecdotal evidence and empirical data gathered by the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce.

Not that Winter Park has anything on, say, London when it comes to culture and heritage. It just seems that the city’s Old World ambience — and laid-back vibe — offers a welcome change of pace, and a taste of home, for visitors from across the pond.

“It could be because we’re so different from what’s expected in Orlando,” says Jana Ricci, chair of the chamber’s executive committee. “In any case, in our strategic planning process several years ago, we began considering international tourism in a very serious and thoughtful way.”

The sheer numbers across the region appear to offer a priceless opportunity for a niche destination such as Winter Park.

About 68 million people visited Orange, Seminole and Osceola counties in 2016 — 2 million more than in 2015, according to figures released last August by Visit Orlando,

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BUSINESS

PHOTOS BY RAFAEL TONGOL

Jana Ricci (above left), chair of the chamber’s executive committee, and Betsy Gardner Eckbert (above right), the organization’s president and chief executive officer, say that a concerted effort to reach U.K. vacationers in advance will pay immediate dividends for Winter Park’s shops, restaurants and cultural venues. Longer term, they say, some visitors will relocate or invest here.

the region’s tourism marketing agency. This year is on track to set another record, officials say.

Most — perhaps 90 percent — come from elsewhere in the U.S. But among international visitors, Canada and the U.K top the list. In 2016, more than 500,000 people from the U.K. — which encompasses England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales — arrived in Central Florida on direct flights, according to Visit Orlando.

In the U.K., airlines are making the trip particularly convenient.

There are a total of nine direct flights daily from the U.K. — including Manchester, Gatwick, Glasgow and Dublin — to Orlando International Airport or Orlando Sanford International Airport. Another direct flight is planned from London Heathrow Airport.

So, the actual number of U.K. visitors to Central Florida could be even higher, since many travelers take connecting flights and wouldn’t be included in Visit Orlando’s count.

Betsy Gardner Eckbert, president and chief executive officer of the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce since 2016, wanted more specific numbers.

Anecdotal evidence suggested that the U.K., not Canada, would top the list of international visitors

16 W I N T E R P A R K M A G A ZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

to Winter Park — but no one could be sure.

She began by determining where drop-ins to the chamber’s Winter Park Welcome Center at 151 Lyman Avenue come from.

Over the course of a year, chamber staffers found that 26 percent of several thousand Welcome Center visitors were from other countries. No big surprise there. But of that 26 percent, more than half — 53 percent, to be exact — were from the U.K, with Brazil and Canada following behind.

“It was really sort of a shock,” adds Ricci, who also directs marketing for the Mayflower Retirement Community. “You see more about Canada and even Brazil when looking at the numbers for the region.”

In addition, analytics showed that in 2017, the chamber’s website received more than 5,500 visitors from the U.K. Not huge numbers, perhaps — but encouraging for a small city operating in the shadow of Disney World, SeaWorld, Universal Studios Florida and other tourism behemoths.

“Imagine if we could get just 10 percent of U.K. visitors,” says Gardner Eckbert. “Just 10 percent. What a huge impact that would have.” Best of all, she says, U.K. visitors like to take their vacations in the summer — when business is slowest

in Winter Park.

Those pondering vacations who find the chamber’s website will learn about the city’s dining, shopping, history and accommodations as well as its world-class cultural attractions.

And they’ll get a video invitation from Gardner Eckbert, who offers trip-planning assistance from the chamber’s concierge staffers. “I think people from the U.K. who come to Winter Park are looking for a different kind of experience,” adds Gardner Eckbert. “They want an unhurried, no-hassle environment.”

Indeed, laid-back Winter Park provides quite a contrast to the hubbub of the area’s theme parks.

The city gives off a European-meets-Mediterranean vibe that makes U.K. visitors feel comfortable.

And some tourism experts have warned that Central Florida’s increasingly stupendous theme parks — and the massive crowds they draw — may ultimately make the region less desirable to visitors.

In other words, there can actually be too much of a good thing.

In an interview last August with the Orlando Sentinel, Youcheng Wang, an associate dean at the University of Central Florida and a professor at the Rosen School for Hospitality Management, said it’s unwise to position the region only as “the world capital of theme parks.”

“I think you have a problem if you continue to do that,” Wang said. “That’s not a reflection of reality. Orlando is much bigger than that.”

Yet, absent a large marketing budget, how can Winter Park ensure that it gets its share of those 500,000 U.K. visitors who may be suffering from sensory overload after days of navigating Tourist World?

Gardner Eckbert — as is her style — insists that partnerships and collaborations are the way to go.

She has been a proponent of moving the organization toward becoming less event focused and more oriented toward quantifiable, ongoing programs that will generate business for chamber members.

Along those lines, plenty is happening behind the scenes.

Last year, the chamber’s Welcome Center became a Certified Visitor Information Center through a program operated by Visit Florida, the statewide tourism promotion agency. (Visit Florida is now a separate entity, unaffiliated with Visit Orlando.)

Among other things, earning certification means that a link to the chamber’s website now appears on the heavily trafficked Visit Florida website. There are only five certified centers in Central Florida — and all but Winter Park’s are in the tourist corridor.

Then, in November of last year, Gardner Eckbert and Katherine Keller, the chamber’s director

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BUSINESS

CELEBRATING

25

of marketing and communications, joined Visit Florida in a booth at the World Travel Market in London, which is attended by tour packagers, travel agents and travel writers.

Picking up the $10,000 tab were the City of Winter Park, the Alfond Inn, the Park Avenue Merchants Association, the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, the Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens, the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park, the Winter Park History Museum and the City Arts & Culture Subcommittee.

“We want to get Winter Park added to specific U.K. travel itineraries,” says Gardner Eckbert, who — fortunately for the chamber — lived in London and was an entrepreneur there from 2009 to 2014. “We want to reach people before they get to Central Florida. We don’t want to count on people discovering us by accident.”

In January, she and Keller traveled to Fort Lauderdale to attend the Florida Huddle, a trade show for domestic and international tour operators. Again, they pitched Winter Park as a relaxing and culture-filled experience for those wishing to take a break from Mickey, Harry and Shamu.

Another big plus for Winter Park, Gardner Eckbert says, is its historic — and recently renovated — municipal golf course, which is ranked

among Links magazine’s Top 10 nine-hole layouts in the U.S. Best of all, Winter Park is a bargain. Many of its cultural attractions have minimal (or no) admittance fees. And, of course, it costs nothing to stroll along Park Avenue, relax in Mead Garden or Central Park, or tool around tree-shaded historic neighborhoods in a rental car.

“The average international tourist stays in Central Florida for 12 days,” she notes. “With the price of passes, it becomes extremely costly to spend all that time at the theme parks — especially when Winter Park offers such a major bang for the buck.”

Without question, Gardner Eckbert is happy when a tourist from the U.K. — or from anywhere else, for that matter — spends a few days in the city and patronizes local merchants and restaurateurs. But she tends to take a longer view.

“We want to convert these visitors from people who spend money in our community to people who invest in our community,” she says.

Perhaps that means buying a vacation home.

Or sending children to Rollins College — an academically solid liberal arts school with one of the most beautiful campuses in the U.S. Medical tourism is also likely to increase with expansions at Winter Park Memorial Hospital

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Last November, Debbie Potter, marketing director of the Alfond Inn, along with the chamber’s Gardner Eckbert and Keller, talked up Winter Park to tour operators and other influencers at the World Travel Market in London. Local businesses and cultural venues picked up most of the tab for the trip.

PHOTO BY RAFAEL TONGOL

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and the opening later this year of the Center for Health & Wellbeing, a partnership between the hospital and the Winter Park Health Foundation.

Some visitors may relocate permanently and impact the local economy by starting new businesses. “We see tourism as an economic driver,” says Gardner Eckbert. “Not just as a result of attracting more first-time visitors — but also when they decide to come back.”

Jay Goodrow is Florida concierge manager at Virgin Holidays, which is the No. 1 tour operator for U.K. residents visiting Orlando. He says Winter Park boosters are smart to position the city as a quaint and calming refuge.

“We’ve brought tens of thousands of British

families here for more than three decades,” says Goodrow. “Many customers return more than once. A key tactic is showcasing just how much more there is to the region than the theme parks — as Winter Park is doing.”

The chamber is also working to secure promotional partnerships with orlandoattractions.com, a website that offers a travel app, and the TUI Group, a huge travel and tourism company headquartered in Germany.

Taktik Enterprises, an Orlando-based restaurant marketing company, now includes Winter Park restaurants on its VIP Dine 4 Less and Kids Eat Free cards, which are distributed to U.K. tourists through Virgin Holidays, British Airways, Or-

bitz and Thomas Cook Group, among others.

Encouraged by early successes, the chamber is considering formation of a tourism task force that will kick all these efforts up yet another notch.

Local businesspeople think it’s jolly good that the chamber is staking a claim on international tourism.

“Having several businesses on Park Avenue, I’m so excited that the chamber is making an effort to put our great city, which has so much to offer, out to the international market,” says Joanne McMahon, owner of 310 and Blu on the Avenue — both restaurants — and the Partridge Tree Gift Shop.

“We’ve already seen an increase in traffic from this. I’m looking forward to what else is to come.”

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PHOTO BY WINTER PARK PICTURES (WINTERPARKPICTURES.COM)

As soon as they log on, visitors to the chamber’s website see this inviting image, which embodies Winter Park’s European-meets-Mediterranean vibe. It’s the Palmer Avenue Bridge, which spans the Flamingo Canal. “We see tourism as an economic driver,” says Gardner Eckbert. “Not just as a result of attracting more first-time visitors — but also when they decide to come back.”

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Sotheby’s International Realty® and the Sotheby’s International Realty logo are registered service marks used with permission. Each office is independently owned and operated. Equal Housing Opportunity.

Property information herein is derived from various sources including, but not limited to, county records and multiple listing services, and may include approximations. All information is deemed accurate.

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F OF ART R M S BARBARA SORENSEN FINDS INSPIRATION IN NATURE AND AT THE HARDWARE STORE.

BY RANDY NOLES WITH LAURA STEWART

W

24 W I N T E R P A R K M A G AZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

hen Winter Park-based sculptor Barbara Sorensen rummages through the aisles at Miller’s Hardware, she isn’t looking for obscure widgets to repair household appliances, or chemical concoctions to remove mold from her bathroom grout.

She’s looking for artistic inspiration.

“I think at first the staff thought I was a little nuts,” says the ebullient Sorensen, a lively and stylish woman who laughs easily and seems decades younger than her 72 years. “But I found some wonderful material that really works for me.”

At Miller’s Hardware?

The densely packed store is, in fact, where Sorensen discovered tubular aluminum foil ductwork manufactured for use in clothes dryer exhaust systems.

Excited by the creative possibilities, she ordered boxloads of the stuff. And why not? It’s lightweight, easy to bend and shape, and can be torn almost as easily as paper.

“Miller’s Hardware is great,” says Sorensen, who is surely one of only a handful of locals who consider the legendary handyman haven to be an art-supply store in disguise. “Any time I can give them a plug, I do.”

The pedestrian but pliable ductwork — torn into crumpled squares, mounted on wood and painted white — has been repurposed as an immense but whimsical installation at the Orlando International Airport.

Ripples in White, which is part of OIA’s expansive permanent art collection, can be seen at the new South Airport Automatic People Mover Complex.

PHOTO BY RAFAEL TONGOL

Sorensen is surrounded by pliable aluminum foil ductwork that’s usually used to ventilate clothes dryer exhaust systems.

She used the material to create a magnificent piece of art, Ripples in White, which is now part of the Orlando International Airport’s permanent collection.

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Sorensen’s works most often use materials from the earth, and call to mind primal forces and ancient mysteries. Her elongated nymphs (facing page) and chalices (left) are particularly intriguing, and have been described by one critic as “referring to the landscape, acting as metaphors for time and embodying ideas pregnant with ceremonial and elemental implications.”

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No one who has followed Sorensen’s career should be surprised that she has figured out a way to create timeless art using a hardware-store item that, for most of us, serves no purpose apart from removing lint.

Since her earliest work — mystically infused “Pandora’s boxes” inspired by the Greek myth — Sorensen has consistently been inspired by the sheer joy of moving, molding and manipulating materials.

“My work is about the landscape and the environment,” she says. “My process is about how the earth was formed. I look at the landscape, interpret it and reinterpret it, processing it within.

Then I give it back, transformed.”

Along the way, whether creating richly textured clay chalices, imposing bronze goddesses, weighty clusters of shields or colorful wire structures that she calls “dwellings,” her work seems both primal and contemporary.

And, unlike most art, Sorensen’s creations cry out to be touched. In fact, visitors are invited to feel the ridges, patterns and pebbles that make the art both a visual and a tactile experience.

Sorensen — with husband Gary and two young daughters — moved to Winter Park 35 years ago because, she says, “we just didn’t like the weather in Wisconsin.”

But she didn’t become a working artist right away.

Sorensen had earned an art education degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison — where she studied under renowned ceramic artist Don Reitz — and had been a high school art teacher prior to relocating.

Once in Florida, however, she became “a carpool mom,” putting her career on hold while raising children. But by the time the youngsters left for college, she had accrued a decade’s worth of pentup creativity — and was ready to unleash it.

She soon found herself in the pottery studio of Stetson University art professor Dan Gunderson — another Reitz disciple — whom she cites as a major influence on her work.

“When Barbara switched gears, she put the same passion for parenting into her artwork,” wrote Gunderson in 2010, when he curated an exhibition dedicated to her work. “One look at her resumé will prove that she did all the right things. She had the drive to make it happen.”

In 1994 and 1997, respectively, her sculptures

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A LEGACY PROJECT ON

PARK AVENUE Park Hill Raises the Bar on Luxury at a One-of-a-Kind Location.

Hill Gray Seven LLC is offering perhaps the last opportunity to live in a new townhome in the heart of Winter Park’s world-famous shopping and dining district on Park Avenue.

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Enjoy life in the undisputed retail, dining, cultural and intellectual hub of Central Florida, in an exclusive project that can never be duplicated. Of the five homes that remain, prices start at $2.65 million for the 3,300-square-foot units and $3.35 million for the 4,300-square-foot units, so act now on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

For more information, please call Mick Night, Realtor, at Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate

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Hill Gray Seven is a family owned company that develops high-end residential, retail, office, medical and industrial projects in more than 17 states. The company is a preferred developer to many national firms such as DaVita Dialysis, a Fortune 500 company.

Sorensen’s heavily textured boats (above) symbolize, perhaps, a journey between life and death. Her shields (left) are ornamented with runes, pebbles, circles, incisions, crests and boldly colored bands. Both are impossible not to touch.

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were spotlighted at the Albertson-Peterson Gallery in Winter Park and Orlando City Hall. In 1999, the Cornell Fine Art Museum at Rollins College staged Barbara Sorensen: Sculpture as Environment.

“That all got my adrenaline going,” says Sorensen, who seems to have an unlimited supply of the hormone coursing through her veins.

Throughout the next decade, museums and private collectors around the country began clamoring for her work.

That’s partly because Sorensen was no ordinary potter. She had found new ways of expressing her artistic vision through primal, heavily textured and highly symbolic forms.

During family ski trips, she studied at Snowmass Village, near Aspen, at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. There she connected with another soon-to-be mentor, ceramic artist Paul Soldner, who encouraged her to work on a larger scale and “helped me to find my own voice as an artist.”

Soldner, she adds, “told me to give myself permission to experiment and to grow.”

Workshops at Anderson Ranch, Sorensen recalls, consisted of “critiquing, going out for meals

COFFEE? OF COURSE. BUT BARNIE’S IS ALSO THE AVENUE’S COOLEST EATERY.

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“

et’s meet at Barnie’s.” That’s a phrase that has been uttered by virtually every Winter Parker at one time or another. Barnie’s CoffeeKitchen, tucked into Greenada Court along Park Avenue, is an ideal location for meeting, socializing and sipping award-winning coffee blends.

Now, though, Barnie’s has become a go-to destination for delicious breakfast and lunch offerings, with a full menu of fresh and fabulous meals.

Start the day with, for example, huevos rancheros (sunny-side up eggs, roasted tomato salsa, avocado mash, black bean pico de gallo, cotija cheese and flour tortillas) or the BCK burrito (eggs, horizon sausage, roasted potatoes, pequillo peppers, white cheddar cheese and salsa verde). There are also hot cereals, fruit bowls and paninis from which to choose. And don’t forget the avocado toast, which is the bestselling item on the menu.

You can go old-school, and order eggs your way with buttered toast and two sides. Or buttermilk biscuits with seasoned gravy and chicken sausage. A special treat is the Farmer’s Breakfast Salad — baby spinach tossed with bacon vinaigrette and topped with a poached egg in a nest of chicken sausage, heirloom tomatoes, pickled onion and avocado.

Lunch choices include a Cuban sandwich pressed with mojo pork, sliced ham, aged Swiss, house-made dill pickles and mustard. Or try the loaded potato soup, the truffle grilled cheese or the best BLT you’ve ever tasted. There are an array of other sandwiches and salads — and even shrimp tacos — on the ambitious menu.

For Sunday brunch, why not splurge with a thick slice of French toast layered with berry jam and topped with fresh market fruit, powdered sugar, maple syrup and whipped cream? A mimosa might just hit the spot as well.

Barnie’s offers wine and craft beer as a perfect accompaniment for its farm-to-table fare.

You can sit inside, or in the adjacent courtyard — and dogs are always welcome.

Founded 38 years ago in Central Florida, Barnie’s iconic Winter Park café has long been the steamy center of local coffee culture. Now, it’s also the place to go for a delicious meal — with a menu full of choices.

Coffee? Of course. That’s at the core of what Barnie’s does. But this legendary Winter Park location, where the limits of coffee artistry are pushed, is now also the coolest eatery on the Avenue.

Visit “No Filter Friday” on the second Friday of every month — it’s a free coffee-tasting/ cupping event. Plus, Barnie’s specialty coffees are available online and through most major grocery chains.

Monday – Thursday: 7 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Friday – Saturday: 7 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Sunday: 7:30 a.m. – 6 p.m.

118 South Park Avenue, Winter Park

407.629.0042 barniescoffee.com

WHAT’S SELLING IN WINTER PARK 1351 COLLEGE POINT, $1,035,500 3,127 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms LISTING AGENT: Michael Gonick, Premier Sotheby’s Winter Park SELLING AGENT: Michelle Hochfelder, Premier Sotheby’s Winter Park WHY WE LOVE IT: This European contemporary home, built in 2004, is truly a work of art — in an architectural style that’s hard to find within walking distance of downtown Winter Park. “I loved to show this property because it was a totally Zen experience each and every time,” says listing agent Michael Gonick of Premier Sotheby’s Winter Park. Unique features include a spectacular, light-filled courtyard and a koi pond, which can be seen from every room on the ground floor, and dual garages that flank either side. The home offers Chain of Lake access via Lake Virginia, with a private community boat dock exclusively for the use of College Point residents.

Michael Gonick

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Premier Sotheby’s International Realty

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407.383.2563

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PremierSothebysRealty.com

Clay isn’t the only medium Sorensen has mastered. Wire “dwellings” (left) are airy, colorful installations that look like X-rays of three-dimensional clay forms. Indeed, if it can be molded or shaped, Sorensen can use it to create art.

and firing kilns on those beautiful days and nights that only Aspen has. I remember a lot of sharing of ideas, of new and important turning points in my work, epiphanies and new directions.”

While out west, Sorensen also soaked up the stunning natural environment during long hikes, and “used the kiln to repeat nature’s formation.”

Eventually, the family bought a condominium in Snowmass Village, where the family still spends part of the year.

Sorensen’s works, according to New York-based art critic Eleanor Heartney, “are rich with meaning — simultaneously referring to the landscape, acting as metaphors for time and embodying ideas pregnant with ceremonial and elemental implications.”

Goddesses — their elongated bodies twisting and stretching skyward — are breathtaking allusions to such forces of nature as whirling winds, erosion and ultimate decay. But they’re unquestionably beautiful; alluring in their slim, precarious balance.

Pandora’s boxes often feature lids embedded with actual gems and golden surfaces. Chalices, sometimes delicately poised on tiny bases, are adorned with colorful flounces that hint at the gowns of Minoan maidens.

Encrusted half-moons of clay become formidable shields, their surfaces gloriously ornamented with runes, pebbles, circles, incisions, crests and boldly colored bands. Most even bear the artist’s fingerprints.

Works from Sorensen’s boat-inspired series rest on floors or are suspended as if by magic from ceilings, casting ghostly multiple shadows and representing, perhaps, a journey between life and death.

Sorensen — whose work can be found in countless private and corporate collections — was never particularly fond of making flawless pottery on a wheel; she prefers to pull, twist, stretch and squeeze the clay, and to experiment with glazes, textures and unexpected enhancements.

Clay, in fact, isn’t the only medium she has mastered.

Wire “dwellings” are airy, colorful installations that look like X-rays of three-dimensional clay forms, while another series, inspired by wind, features strands of rope swirled to resemble tiny funnel clouds.

Other series reflect natural phenomena, such as the subtle shifting of sand dunes and the impact of wind and water on the striated stone outcroppings in Utah’s Zion National Park.

Works reflecting these assorted themes can

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To some, Ripples in White (above) calls to mind the effect of wind on water. A detail from the work (right) shows the complex shapes into which Sorensen hand-twisted the raw material before coating it with white paint.

be seen throughout Sorensen’s Windsong home — hanging on the wall, occupying nooks and crannies, and standing guard over gardens and a backyard swimming pool.

She works mostly in her garage, although she has warehouse space for materials in the Orange Blossom Trail area.

“My work isn’t the normal stuff that people turn out in clay,” she says. “And I’m always discovering new things. For example, clay had become sort of limiting. That’s when I went to Miller’s Hardware and found the dryer ducting.”

Although Sorensen’s work is prized everywhere, it’s particularly revered locally.

In 2010, the Museum of Florida Art in Deland staged Barbara Sorensen: Topographies, which was curated by Gunderson — her onetime professor.

It was, at that time, the most complete overview of her work ever assembled.

An expanded version of Topographies came to the Orlando Museum of Art in 2012. The dramatic entrance to the exhibit was a cluster of stoneware speleothems — stalactite and stalagmite formations — that rose from the ground and descended from the ceiling.

More recently, the Mennello Museum of American Art unveiled a permanent display of Sorensen’s

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sculptures — including an enchanting “Chalice Forest” — on the facility’s grounds.

Inside the museum hung Ripples in White, which was spotted by a fellow Winter Parker: Carolyn Fennell, senior director of public affairs and community relations at OIA. Fennell thought the piece would be ideal for OIA and suggested that it be acquired by the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority.

“I’ve followed Barbara’s work for years,” says Fennell, who thought Ripples in White would be ideal for OIA’s collection since it evokes the calming vibe of the region’s many lakes. “There’s so much anxiety associated with travel, and we know that an art piece can really offer relief.”

Sorensen says she thrilled to have her work in OIA’s collection: “After all, Orlando is my town, so I couldn’t be more proud. It’s so exciting.”

What’s next for Sorensen? She isn’t slowing down, although she says she doesn’t do much heavy lifting any more — she has an assistant for that — and primarily concentrates on commissioned work.

She isn’t finished with metallic ductwork, she adds, although you never know what new medium she may encounter during her next visit to Miller’s Hardware.

Notes Sorensen: “If people acquire my art, that enables me to make more. And even though I’ve fulfilled a lot of my goals, I’m still discovering new things and think I still have something to say.”

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Several Winter Park artists have floor installations at the Orlando International Airport. Henry Sinn’s Field of Ferns (above), located in Terminal A near the tram, features a variety of stylized ferns in turquoise, green and other colors against a vivid yellow background. Grady Kimsey’s Florascape (below left), located in Terminal A near Gates 123 and 124, is brimming with wildflowers and sunshine. Victor Bokas’ Florida Vacation (below right), located in Terminal A near Gate 103, is nautically themed, dominated by abstract fish.

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AN ARTFUL WELCOME One of the most extraordinary collections of Florida-themed art isn’t in a museum. It’s in the Orlando International Airport. And more than 44 million people every year see at least some of it.

“Art is a growing focus of airports,” says Carolyn Fennell, a longtime Winter Park resident and senior director of public affairs and community relations for the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority.

“They’re moving from being simply receptacles to being welcoming gateways. More and more, you’ll see airports creating a sense of place through art.”

Fennell says that’s more important than ever because of the increased anxiety associated with air travel. “Art can offer relief,” Fennell says, while also highlighting what’s special about the region.

At OIA, most of the art — floor mosaics, sculptural installations, and an array of large-scale paintings and photographs — focuses on the natural environment.

Not all the works are literal representations. Winter Park-based sculptor Barbara Sorensen’s recently installed Ripples in White, which can be seen at the new South Airport Automatic People Mover Complex, is fashioned from crumpled clothes dryer duct material. But it calls to mind ripples of water seen in the region’s thousands of lakes.

Ripples in White hangs on a wall. But Wellness Garden, installed late last year at the west end of the A-Side of the Main Terminal, is on the floor. It’s South Dakota-based artist Scott Parsons’ 28-by32-foot homage to the region’s rich agricultural history.

Subsequent epoxy-terrazzo “welcome mats” will showcase technology, attractions and the space industry.

About half the artists whose work appears in the OIA collection are from Florida. Three, in addition to Sorensen, have Winter Park roots. All created vivid floor mosaics that have by now been admired — and trod upon — by millions.

Henry Sinn’s Field of Ferns, located in Terminal A near the tram, features a variety of stylized ferns in turquoise, green and other colors against a vivid yellow background.

Grady Kimsey’s Florascape, located in Terminal A near Gates 123 and 124, is brimming with wildflowers and sunshine. It’s a favorite with children, who can often be seen carefully traversing the stems or jumping from flower to flower, hopscotch style.

Victor Bokas’ Florida Vacation, located in Terminal A near Gate 103, is nautically themed, dominated by abstract fish. A segment of that piece was used by OIA on a collectible trading card as part of a program sponsored by the Airports Council International.

The most recent art installation at OIA is Wellness Garden (above), completed late last year at the west end of the A-Side of the Main Terminal. Longtime Winter Park resident Carolyn Fennell (right), the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority’s senior director of public affairs and community relations, says that OIA boasts one of the largest public art collections in the Southeast.

Art has been integral to OIA ever since the facility opened in 1981. And a portion of construction funding for expansions and improvements is still earmarked for art acquisition. Today, OIA’s collection is among the largest public art collections in the Southeast.

“Our art collection from ceiling to floor has been recognized locally and nationally,” says Frank Kruppenbacher, OIA’s chairman. “We’ve always said this airport is more than an airport. It’s a reflection of the experiences of Central Florida.”

Adds Fennell: “We want our art to reflect the Orlando experience. When you arrive here, we want you to know you’re in Florida just by looking at the art.”

— Randy Noles S PRING 2 0 1 8 | W IN T ER PARK MAGAZ IN E

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INTRODUCING A ONE-OF-A-KIND

Nestled alongside neighboring Interlachen Country Club, The Reserve at Interlachen, a gated, one-of-a-kind community, offers idyllic views you’ll savor — and the peace of mind you’ve come to expect. Only nine extraordinary custom homes are being built on this unique property. Residents enjoy the prestige and convenience of a Winter Park address in an intimate, private community unlike any other in this world-renowned city of arts and culture.

Only seven of the nine homesites are remaining.

Tour our model home by appointment only. Model opening in early May. Please contact Premier Realty Partners at 321-236-5118.

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THE SALES TEAM: SPECIALISTS IN LUXURY REAL ESTATE Premier Realty Partners, the exclusive sales agent for The Reserve at Interlachen, is one of Central Florida’s most accomplished luxury real estate teams. Broker-President Chocky Burks (center), with more than 25 years’ experience, is consistently ranked among the top 1 percent of Realtors in Central Florida. Co-Founders Steve Healy (left) and Matt Tomaszewski (right) are also top seasoned sales executives, each with decades of experience and numerous professional accolades to their credit. All three are deeply involved in charitable causes related to the arts, healthcare and children’s issues. A long roster of delighted clients report exemplary service, personal attention and peerless professionalism from Premier Realty Partners.

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BY RANDY NOLES PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAFAEL TONGOL

and

THIS HISTORIC WEST SIDE COTTAGE WAS A SURE BET TO BE TORN DOWN. BUT EVELYN KELLY HAD OTHER IDEAS.

W

hen Susan Skolfield noted that the ramshackle bungalow across the street from her tidy home on Garfield Avenue had been sold, she assumed that the new owner would tear it down and build something new.

A lifelong Winter Parker who serves as executive director of the Winter Park History Museum, Skolfield is all about preservation. But she had little expectation that 411 Garfield, which was built around 1925 and sits at the corner of Garfield and Virginia Drive, could be salvaged.

After all, that’s how it usually goes on the west side.

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A 300-square-foot screened back porch and a carport pergola were added to the rear of this circa-1925 west side home as part of an extensive remodeling project. Neighbors had assumed that the onceforelorn frame structure was destined for demolition.

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The home at 411 Garfield was water damaged, termiteridden and structurally shaky. The front porch had been enclosed by perhaps the world’s worst handyman, and interior rooms had been chopped up to accommodate two tenants. Today, adventurous owner Evelyn Kelly (bottom) enjoys living in a cozy vintage home with all the modern bells and whistles just blocks from Park Avenue.

The traditionally African-American neighborhood was designated by the city’s founders in the 1880s as a place where “Negro families of good character” could own property near where they worked, which was often for affluent residents on the opposite side of the railroad tracks.

The area — which includes the redeveloped Hannibal Square business district and some pricey infill residential projects — has been gentrifying in recent decades.

The stark racial divide is, of course, no longer codified. Although African-Americans still comprise the majority of west side residents, diversity is increasing as buyers descend upon the last bastion of affordable housing in Winter Park’s redhot urban core.

“The location is amazing — just two blocks from Park Avenue — and the neighborhood is truly multiethnic,” says Skolfield, who moved to the west side in 2014. “When I found my place, I thought, ‘This is it.’”

Skolfield’s home was built in 1996. Despite the west side’s proud heritage, it encompasses relatively few homes that date from the 1920s. Most

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were built in the 1950s and 1960s.

That’s why forlorn 411 Garfield was such a diamond in the rough. Make that very rough.

Evelyn Kelly, a Californian who buys and renovates homes for use as vacation rentals, knew as soon as she saw it that 411 Garfield — which was in disrepair and had been victimized by decades of patchwork repairs — could be salvaged.

Kelly, who retired in 2014, had spent 18 years with Associates Purchasing, a Los Angeles-based Knoll furniture dealership that offered interior design services to major commercial clients.

All the while, however, she had been buying and restoring intriguing older homes across the U.S., and marketing them as vacation rentals. Her first

Christy Knox and Liz Jones (top, left to right), then affiliated with Kelly Price & Company in Winter Park and now with Mainframe Real Estate in Orlando, showed Kelly their listing at 411 Garfield, a home that they frankly described as “a disaster.” But when Kelly showed interest, Knox and Jones put her in touch with contractor Jason Sellers (above right), owner of SEI Custom, whose motto is “whatever you can dream up, we can build.” Part of what Kelly dreamed up was a long combined living room and kitchen with heart pine floors that would encompass space previously chopped up into several claustrophobic rooms.

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such project was in Santa Monica, where she rehabilitated a cluster of five circa 1920s bungalows.

Buying 411 Garfield was, in part, a business decision. It would enhance Kelly’s portfolio by adding a location squarely within the tourism capital of the world, yet seemingly far removed from the crowded tackiness that such a designation denotes.

It was also a personal decision. The home would give Kelly a warm-weather address in a city that she found enchanting. “I had fallen in love with Winter Park,” she says.

What’s more, it was love at first sight.

Kelly’s daughter and grandchildren had visited Central Florida many times to enjoy the tourist attractions, particularly Disney World. They had discovered the low-key City of Culture and Heritage while on vacation.

In 2016, Kelly joined them for a trip.

“My daughter kept saying, ‘While we’re here, you’ve just got to see Winter Park,’” she recalls.

The master bedroom opens onto the inviting back porch.

Like the rest of the home, the bedroom is furnished with a combination of new furniture and eclectic antique pieces.

Savannah-based interior designer Jane Coslick, who collaborated with Kelly on the restoration of a cottage on Tybee Island in Georgia, is responsible for the warm and welcoming ambiance.

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“‘You’ve got to see downtown, you’ve got to see Rollins College, and you’ve got to stay at the Alfond Inn.’” Who wouldn’t be dazzled after seeing all that?

So, Kelly — who was dividing her time between vacation homes in California, Georgia and Mexico — contacted Christy Knox and Liz Jones, then affiliated with Kelly Price & Company in Winter Park and now with Mainframe Real Estate in Orlando.

She wanted a home in the heart of the city, and within walking distance of its shopping, dining and cultural amenities. And she didn’t want to spend seven figures.

“We showed Evelyn 411 Garfield, and she loved it from the minute she saw it,” says Knox. “The place was a disaster. But she recognized that it was in an up-and-coming area. She had the vision for what it could be.”

Disaster might be putting it mildly.

The home was water damaged, termite-ridden and structurally shaky. Interior rooms had been chopped up to accommodate two tenants, and the most recent occupants had kept numerous dogs inside, with predictable consequences. The front porch had been enclosed by perhaps the world’s most incompetent handyman, and there was no central air conditioning.

Nonetheless, Kelly bought the property last year for $259,000.

“My first reaction was, ‘We should probably just tear this down,’” recalls Jason Sellers, owner of SEI Custom, the builder whom Knox and Jones recommended to Kelly. “But we say, ‘Whatever you can dream up, we can build.’”

Skolfield, who was amazed when no bulldozers showed up, says she would sometimes walk across the street and peer into windows to check progress. Eventually, she met Kelly — and found a kindred spirit.

“She was so gracious,” says Skolfield of Kelly.

“When I learned that she was really restoring the home, I was so excited. It takes a special kind of person to do something like this. You need passion and vision, and Evelyn has both.”

Given her profession, Skolfield was also interested in the history of the home. Much to her surprise, she discovered that her friend Ruthenia Beacham Moses had lived there as a young woman.

In fact, Moses told Skolfield, the home had been moved to the west side in late 1959 or early 1960 — something Kelly hadn’t even known.

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Doreen advises women who are seeking to kickstart a new health journey to: • Speak openly. Tell your physician and/or nurse about all your health concerns. You should never feel embarrassed or hesitant to tell them if you’re trying and struggling to make changes. They’ve heard it all, and they want what is best for you.

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One of the 1,200-square-foot home’s two bathrooms has a walk-in shower. The other, which is connected to the master bedroom, has a soaking tub with an overhead shower. Both bathrooms boast cement tile floors featuring a colorful and whimsical design.

“I’m not sure where the place came from,” Moses says. “My grandfather bought a grove where the house is now. He told my mother, ‘You’re a good daughter, so I’m going to clear part of the grove and put a house there for you.’”

Moses’ grandfather was Willy W. Wallace, who owned a concrete company in Orlando. Her mother, Olivia Wallace Beacham, is still living and celebrates her 100th birthday this year. Her father, Rev. David S. Beacham, was a traveling Church of

God in Christ minister and west side community leader who died in 1999.

Moses left 411 Garfield to attend Bethune Cookman College (now Bethune Cookman University) in Daytona Beach. After graduation, she returned and lived there again from 1968 to 1970.

The Beacham family owned the home until 2002, when they sold it for $250,000.

“We had the prettiest yard on the street,” recalls Moses. “They divided it into apartments.

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It was looking bad. I remember driving by and thinking, ‘This isn’t Mom’s house.’ I’m so glad to see what’s happened with it now.”

In fact, because of the size of the lot — just 40 feet by 100 feet — a McMansion at 411 Garfield was never in the offing. But Kelly could certainly have opted to raze the 1,200-square-foot home and build a new one.

Indeed, she probably could have done exactly that for less money. But the fact that she chose to renovate helps the neighborhood maintain its unpretentious ambiance — and preserves a vestige of the west side’s past.

“Oh, there may have been times that I thought I had made a mistake,” shrugs Kelly, who declines to say what the project cost in total. “But the places I’d done in Santa Monica were even worse. And I couldn’t be more happy with how it all turned out.”

Kelly credits the unflappable Sellers and her friend, Savannah-based interior designer Jane Coslick, for transforming the decrepit eyesore into a cozy and quirky cottage that, unlike some newer west side homes, reflects the character of the neighborhood.

Outside is lushly landscaped, allowing 411 Garfield to reclaim the mantle of “prettiest yard on the street.” Inside is highlighted by a long, combined living room and kitchen.

The living room has an electric fireplace, while the kitchen is outfitted with bright retro-style Big Chill appliances guaranteed to make a visitor smile. The décor combines vintage and modern elements, with plenty of bright colors.

The floors throughout are heart pine, and there are two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Every square inch is thoughtfully and efficiently used, so closet space is substantial for a home so small.

A 300-square-foot screened back porch and a carport pergola have been added.

Kelly and Coslick had collaborated before, on a funky Tybee Island, Georgia, cottage that was featured in a 2014 issue of Coastal Living magazine.

Today, the Tybee Island home — located a block from the beach — is part of Kelly’s vacation-home rental inventory.

And so is 411 Garfield. Although Kelly has embedded herself in Winter Park — she attends First United Methodist Church and has joined the Winter Park Women’s Club — the property is posted on her website, frontporchvacationrentals.com. It’s priced at $175 per night, with a five-night minimum and no parties or events allowed.

But don’t expect it to be available often, since Kelly — who could live anywhere she pleases — plans to be in residence most of the time.

When she’s in town, you can probably find her relaxing on the back porch. She even likes the fact that the railroad tracks are only a block away.

Notes Kelly: “I’m from the country. I lived in California, but I was born in Texas and raised near the railroads. I love to hear the trains go by.”

50 W I N T E R P A R K M A GAZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

The kitchen is outfitted with bright retro-style Big Chill appliances guaranteed to make a visitor smile. A coffeemaker and other kitchen necessities are hidden behind a spacious floor-to-ceiling pantry.

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Moral CAPITALIST IN THE AFTERMATH OF RECONSTRUCTION, WINTER PARK PIONEER LEWIS LAWRENCE BROUGHT HIS CRUSADING SPIRIT SOUTH.

By Scot French

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inter Park and Maitland pioneer Lewis Lawrence is unknown to most modern-day residents. His efforts to promote civil rights in the Deep South — including his role as a founder of Eatonville, the first self-governed black township in the U.S. — were eclipsed by the long, dark period of disfranchisement and segregation that followed.

Lawrence, who died in 1886 at age 80, was once an active civic patron and beloved benefactor whose name adorned a street, a church, a village and an Odd Fellows lodge. Today, he lies in an upstate New York cemetery a forgotten man.

He deserves better.

In 1875, Lawrence built a home on Hudson’s Bay — it’s now known as the Lawrence-Chubb Cottage at 1300 Summerlin Avenue — and established two model citrus groves using experimental techniques that produced oranges of extraordinary size and quality.

In 1881, out of concern for the welfare of the area’s homeless black labor force, he partnered with ex-slave Joseph E. Clark and Union Navy veteran Captain Josiah C. Eaton to establish “a colored village at Maitland, sometimes called Lawrence,” which later became Eatonville.

A staunch Republican and a friend and confidant of Winter Park cofounder Loring A. Chase, he consulted on plans for Hannibal Square, and encouraged black political participation to ensure that Winter Park’s 1888 incorporation effort was successful.

What led Lawrence — a wealthy retired businessman from Utica, New York — to champion the participation of African-Americans in the civic life and political organization of post-Reconstruction Florida?

How did his experiences as a philanthropist, social reformer and Republican Party activist in the Northeast shape his attitudes toward race, labor and town-building in this newly settled region of the Sunshine State?

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In fact, Lawrence was as an exemplar of what early 19th-century American historians have dubbed “moral capitalism.”

He gave generously to the poor in a century before the modern welfare state provided a safety net for society’s outcasts and misfits. He also gave judiciously — meaning he viewed charity as a prudent investment that, managed wisely, would pay dividends for the recipient, the donor and society alike.

Lawrence carried out his good works first in upstate New York and later in Central Florida, with a Christian’s eye toward salvation and a capitalist’s eye toward productivity and good labor relations.

Time and again in their memorial tributes, friends commented on the skill with which Lawrence harmonized his Christian beliefs with his economic interests as an employer.

“He was, indeed, an encouraging instance of the way in which a capitalist can exhibit a Christian character in his dealings with laboring men,” observed his friend and pastor, the Rev. Thomas J. Brown, in a book about Lawrence’s life. “He solved, to his own satisfaction and theirs, the difficult question, how friendly relations can be maintained between master and men.”

On race, Lawrence expressed broadly egalitarian views uncommon for his day. He was, by all accounts, an early and ardent abolitionist who joined the Republican Party because it opposed the extension of slavery into new territories — and later the very existence of the “peculiar institution” that led to the Civil War. After emancipation, he supported the party’s so-called radical Reconstruction agenda of U.S. citizenship for ex-slaves, voting rights for black men and civil rights for all without regard to race, color or previous condition of servitude.

And, acting on principle, he broke with party leaders when they agreed to the infamous Compromise of 1877, which removed federal troops from the South

S PRING 2 0 1 8 | W IN T ER PARK MAGAZ IN E

COURTESY OF THE ROLLINS COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Winter Park pioneer Henry Lewis Lawrence’s efforts to promote civil rights in the Deep South — including his role as a founder of Eatonville, the first self-governed black township in the U.S. — are little remembered today. But his legacy is profound.

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At the gateway to Eatonville on Kennedy Boulevard, a plaque commemorates the founding of the St. Lawrence African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was named in honor of Lewis Lawrence. He founded the village on 20 acres bought from Union Navy veteran Captain Josiah C. Eaton.

Setting aside house lots for “colored” workers ensured a select few from that once-excluded class a decent place to live and a vote.

But it also made those newly enfranchised black voters vulnerable to gerrymandering and disfranchisement should their Northern white patrons lose power, and their presence as free and equal citizens be deemed an intolerable threat to white supremacy in a rising, Democrat-controlled New South.

PHOTO BY RAFAEL TONGOL

A RADICAL REFORMER

in exchange for the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes following a disputed election.

Lawrence envisioned the rise of a modern, harmonious, class-stratified society in Central Florida, built on the economic and political alliance of wealthy white snowbirds and the black workers they employed year-round in homes, railroads, hotels, shops and groves.

Orange County’s racial and regional demographics, as a newly settled region with no plantation slavery legacy and no entrenched Southern culture, offered unique opportunities to create civil society anew.

The 1885 Florida Census for Maitland, Eatonville and Winter Park lists 880 residents, a clear majority of them — based on race and place of birth — representing the core

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Republican coalition of Southern-born blacks and Northern-born whites.

Lawrence understood this, and considered Florida the most “northernized” of the Southern states — with the best prospects for economic and political development on a model social framework.

“No North, no South,” he proclaimed, optimistically, in a New Year’s Day 1883 telegram message from Winter Park to his friend, President Chester A. Arthur, in Washington, D.C. Ultimately, however, Lawrence’s utopian vision of racial and regional reconciliation proved blind to the realities of local and state politics in Florida. He gave little thought, it seems, to the implications of creating segregated subdivisions for African-American workers within white majority townships.

Sadly, Lawrence left no memoir and no collection of private letters to posterity. Fortunately, the rags-to-riches narrative of his life is wellchronicled in newspaper obituaries and a memorial volume, called Lawrence, published shortly after his death.

Friends and family recounted his humble beginnings some eight decades earlier on a farm in the town of Otego, New York; the untimely deaths of both parents, which left him fatherless at age 4 and orphaned at age 15; and his sevenyear apprenticeship to a carpenter in the nearby town of Franklin.

“He became a good workman,” his friend and pastor, Rev. Brown, recalled, “And, though not destined nor ever intending to live by his handicraft, he drove every nail as carefully and conscientiously as if upon that nail hung his future.”

In 1828, newly married and with three dollars in his pocket, Lawrence set out for Utica, a city big enough to fulfill his dreams of success.

Within five years, thanks to the region’s booming commercial and industrial market economy, he had laid the foundation for his fortune in the building trades.

Starting as a contractor, he expanded his business to include the purchase and sale of lumber and the planing and matching of flooring. He was, by all accounts, a man of uncommon enterprise and ingenuity. From milling and planning, he expanded into timbering, clearing land in once-remote areas of New York State and northern Pennsylvania.

Like many men and women of Utica’s emerging middle class, Lawrence joined in the spiritual revival known as the Second Great Awakening — a “shopkeeper’s millennium” that swept through upstate New York in the 1830s — and became active in the major reform movements of his day.

Lawrence’s early and active involvement in

PHOTO BY RAFAEL TONGOL

Scot French, a Maitland resident and an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida, has been writing a book on Eatonville’s history. He describes Lawrence as an “exemplar of what early 19th-century American historians have called ‘moral capitalism.’”

the Abolitionist movement is well documented.

As a young builder/mechanic, he attended the inaugural 1835 meeting of the New York AntiSlavery Society, which was famously attacked and broken up by pro-slavery mobs. “He was in the thick of the fight,” his friend, the Rev. Brown, wrote, “He never lacked the courage of his convictions, and gave and received heavy blows.”

At a subsequent meeting, with several proslavery rioters present but silent, Lawrence was elected vice president of the Utica Chapter of the New York Anti-Slavery Society.

Lawrence actively assisted in shielding fugitive slaves and guiding them to freedom in Canada via the region’s Underground Railroad. His friend, U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling, was one of many friends and eulogists who attested to Lawrence’s commitment: “Under the strain of hazardous business, to which he devoted hours which most men give to rest, he turned aside, never without peril, whenever a fleeing slave could be helped to Canada, or secreted from his pursuers.”

In helping runaways avoid the slave catchers, friends noted, Lawrence engaged in public acts of civil disobedience that left him subject to arrest. Indeed, he was arrested several times during his anti-slavery activities.

Lawrence embraced the temperance movement with equal fervor. He “believed strong drink the foe of man,” Conkling recalled, and resisted all efforts to moderate his views.

Lawrence put his temperance principles to the test in 1863 with the founding of a logging and railroad town called Maple Hill in a remote

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wooded region near Williamstown, New York.

There he saw an opportunity to make a handsome profit clearing and marketing lumber.

As he would later, when establishing his “colored village” at Maitland, Lawrence insisted on sobriety as a condition of residency in his company town. The Rev. Brown described Lawrence’s efforts to impose his will over the workers, many of whom were hard-drinking French Canadians: “[The employees] rebelled against the strict regulations he introduced, especially the sobriety he enjoined. But upon this last point Mr. Lawrence’s principles had been long fixed. He neither used nor allowed his men to use intoxicating liquors.” Offenders were expelled.

With the drinkers banished, Lawrence set out to create a model workers’ colony, which came to be called Lawrence Township. The largest school in Oswego County, outside the City of Oswego, was maintained on his land, and a large store provided clothing and provisions to his employees and their families.

Lawrence Township, as his colony was called, was successful financially and socially. Lawrence adopted a proudly paternalistic attitude toward his employees, paying fair wages and, according to the Rev. Brown, “providing them with means for mental and moral improvement.”

To address the needs of the poor beyond the scope of his own efforts, Lawrence contributed to such organizations as the Women’s Christian Association of Utica.

When the timber was exhausted and the sawmills and trains stopped running, the workmen and their families left, and Lawrence Township

folded. Barely a trace of the town can be found at the site today.

Yet, this white ethnic immigrant labor colony in upstate New York holds the key to understanding Lawrence’s vision of labor relations and town-building in Central Florida. Lawrence expected his African-American grove workers in Maitland to abide by his rules in exchange for his patronage and protection.

SEEKING A NEW SOUTH After the Civil War and Emancipation, Lawrence turned his reformer’s eye southward to the former states of the Confederacy.

There, after Reconstruction, conservative white “redeemer” governments returned to power and effectively nullified the citizenship rights extended to ex-slaves and their descendants by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

A wave of political violence by the Ku Klux Klan and other terror groups led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — but federal enforcement remained spotty at best and left African-Americans particularly vulnerable to reprisals.

Lawrence expressed his views on race, labor and civil rights through his proprietorship of the Utica Daily Republican, a political organ he founded to support the reelection of Conkling, his friend and neighbor.

In unsigned editorials, written by Lawrence or published with his blessing, the paper decried the political compromise that removed federal troops from the South and deplored the willingness of so-called Liberal Republicans — led by President Hayes — to accept white Southern

stayed North and focused on his Utica Daily Republican editorial duties and the Conkling re-election campaign. In the winter of 1879-80, however, he returned with renewed vigor to his Lake Maitland orange grove.

He built a rough shed, hauled in a great pile of muck, bought chemicals and created an immense compost heap in preparation for farming.

Neighbors marveled at his industry and devotion to the project, and neighbors recalled that “no handsomer nor more neatly tended growth was to [be] seen in the country.”

Eaton recalled seeing Lawrence — then in his mid-70s — getting “right in among the colored hands, and in his shirt sleeves, with his pantaloons rolled up and with a great broad-brimmed straw hat sheltering him from the sun.”

IT TOOK A VILLAGE

A vivid description of the “out houses and hovels” to which Lake Maitland’s black workers were exiled can be found in Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, in which she writes about life in early Eatonville.

“home rule” as the price of sectional peace and national reunification.

To allow enemies of the Union and defenders of slavery to control the government would be a serious mistake, Lawrence wrote: “The people ought to see that … strict and impartial justice is enforced in the South until the love of justice becomes the leading instinct in the Southern heart.”

Lawrence looked to plant the seeds of a new South, freed from slavery’s economic shackles and guided by shrewd capital investments from the North, in the undeveloped frontier regions of Central Florida.

In 1871, upon his retirement, Lawrence embarked on a grand tour that carried him to a state then brimming with opportunity for speculators, migrant laborers, homesteaders and others in search of warmer climes.

Lawrence, according to the Rev. Brown, “saw [in Central Florida], possibilities of future greatness. He believed it would ultimately become the most Northernized of the Southern states.” Lawrence told a friend from Maitland that he viewed the area as a kind of Eden: “I could see in prospect, and that not far in the future, one of the most lovely spots to be found in any tropical clime. I could see those little beautiful lakes surrounded with all kinds of tropical fruits — the orange, lemon, lime, fig, guava, banana, pineapple, grapefruit, pomegranate. It seemed to me that the Lord had prepared those wavelike mounds of soil and those beautiful ponds of water on purpose to replant the Garden of Eden.”

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All that was needed of man, Lawrence believed, “was to possess the ground, keep it pure from all that is hateful to God and man, and the Lord would take care of the rest.” Chief among the “hateful” things excluded from Lawrence’s vision were drinking, gambling and idleness.

In April 1875, Lawrence took his first tentative steps toward establishing a winter home in Central Florida. During a visit to the village of Lake Maitland, he purchased an eight-acre lot — now the site of First Watch on U.S. 17-92 and Lake Avenue — for $450 from C.C. Beasley, one of the area’s pioneer settlers.

Lawrence contracted with Beasley to clear the land and to prepare the ground for the planting of an orange grove. During a return visit the following winter, Lawrence set out 100 budded orange trees.

It was during this second visit that Lawrence met Eaton, a Union Navy veteran from Calais, Maine, who lived in a great house on Lake Catherine and owned much of the land in the area.

Eaton recalled, in vivid detail, his first impressions of Lawrence: “He seemed full of pleasure and interest in everything he saw; our beautiful lake, together with the bright and balmy climate, the class of people who were coming here, the chance of their building up in the near future a prosperous and happy community, seemed to fill his mind with enthusiasm.”

Lawrence was, Eaton recalled, “a bright, cheery old man, full of stimulus and inspiration for us to do well our daily duties.”

For the next two or three winters, Lawrence

It troubled Lawrence, Eaton recalled, to see the workers — some less than two decades years removed from slavery — without decent homes or a church of their own.

He had noticed the reluctance of most people, Northern as much as Southern, to allowing blacks to acquire land in proximity to white settlements. Most people, he observed, “wanted their hands to rise up out of the earth in the morning and when their day’s work was done would have them vanish like ghosts out into the thin air.”

A vivid description of the “out houses and hovels” to which Lake Maitland’s black workers were exiled can be found in Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road: “Now, the Negro population of Maitland settled simultaneously with the White. They had been needed, and found profitable employment.

The best of relations existed between employer and employee. While the White estates flourished on the three-mile length of Lake Maitland, the Negroes set up their hastily built shacks around St. John’s Hole, a lake as round as a dollar, and less than a half mile wide.”

Hurston was referring to what is now called Lake Lily, where black women could be seen every day but Sunday, “squatting around St. John’s Hole on their haunches, primitive style, while their men went forth and made their support in cutting new ground, building and planting orange groves.”

Leaders of the African-American community aspired to better. Sometime between 1875 and 1877, Allen Rickets, Joseph E. Clark and “another colored man” tried to buy land “for the purpose of establishing a colony for colored people.” However, according to Clark, “so great was the prejudice then existing against the Negro that no one would sell them land for such a purpose.”

Lawrence decided to help by creating a subdivision — in effect, a residential labor colony — under his patronage and protection. Working closely

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All that was needed of man, Lawrence believed, “was to possess the ground, keep it pure from all that is hateful to God and man, and the Lord would take care of the rest.” with Eaton, the former Union Naval officer, and Clark, the ex-slave from Georgia, he moved forward with plans to create what Clark described as “a village for the colored people in the near vicinity of [Lawrence’s] grove.”

From Eaton, Lawrence bought 20 acres of land; had it platted in 48 small lots; built a neat church with steeple and bell; and built a few inexpensive model cottages that could be bought on favorable credit terms. But there was to be no liquor, gambling or other misbehavior in this “negro colony,” in which lots were to be sold “to colored people only.”

These racially restrictive covenants, typically used to exclude blacks, had two purposes: First, to clearly delineate the boundaries of the “colored” subdivision and, second, to prevent its disassembly through the actions of individual lot owners who might otherwise have been tempted — or coerced — into selling their shares to white speculators.

Deeds and contracts for community buildings followed suit, with restrictions of other kinds. In May 1882, for example, Lawrence deeded the frame church building and land to the St. Lawrence African Methodist Episcopal Church on the condition “that it never shall be encumbered by debt.”

In July 1883, the St. Lawrence Lodge, No. 2309, Grand United Order of Odd Fellows took possession of its property on the condition that there be no liquor, gambling “or any other disreputable practice injurious to the good morals or peace and good order of society.”

In his sympathetic account, Eaton characterized the restrictive clauses, backed by the threat of forfeiture, as an effective means of excluding potential buyers whose disorderly behavior might corrupt the high moral purpose of the settlement, and confirm the worst expectations of hostile whites who wanted the enterprise to fail.

Here in the “straight clean streets” of Lawrence’s subdivision was proof that — with the support of friendly white neighbors and employers — African-Americans could build model communities worthy of respect and emulation.

As he had in upstate New York, Lawrence used personal charity and philanthropy as “gentle” instruments of social control over those living in the town he had helped to establish. Lawrence intervened routinely in the lives of African-Americans who settled there — all, according to the Rev. Brown, with the best of Christian intentions: “If they were in trouble they came to him. He settled their disputes and tried to teach them independence and habits of industry and economy.”

Lawrence prevailed upon his friends and

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family to contribute as well. His nephew, Edward C. Hungerford of Chester, Connecticut, arranged for the gift of a bell to the St. Lawrence African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Three years later, according to the Orange County Reporter, Hungerford presented a collection of books to “the residents of the colored village at Maitland, sometimes known as Lawrence, the name of its worthy founder and benefactor.”

In response to the gift, the paper added, “the colored young men have formed themselves into a library association, for the proper distribution and preservation of the books.”

Hungerford later donated land for the Hungerford Normal and Industrial School in Eatonville, an institution built on the segregated educational model of Tuskegee Institute and the accommodationist political philosophy of its founder, Booker T. Washington.

The African-American community of Maitland and Eatonville gratefully accepted these gifts and — by way of reciprocity — publicly honored Lawrence as a friend and patron saint. In an 1889 issue of the Eatonville Speaker, Clark acknowledged the vital role played by Lawrence — “a whole souled philanthropist” — in the establishment of the town.

Likewise, the Reverend R.S. Quarterman of Eatonville credited Lawrence with building the original St. Lawrence A.M.E. Church — still standing, and known today as the Historic Thomas House — and generously supporting the black community through his patronage.

“In 1881,” Quarterman recalled, “there was not a single place in the town of Maitland to worship God, or spend the Sabbath in doing good; neither was there any place where colored people could buy homes or build cottages to live in within a mile of Maitland.”

Lawrence, in turn, expected and received the community’s gratitude. “He declared often,” Eaton wrote, “that nowhere had he found people more appreciative of the kindness shown them.”

PILLAR OF WINTER PARK Once an absentee owner, Lawrence became a prominent winter resident of unincorporated Lake Maitland and, later, Winter Park.

In 1881, he bought the 30-acre Hudson’s Bay tract at the north end of Lake Maitland — later annexed by Winter Park — and built a permanent winter residence there. The house, now known as the Lawrence-Chubb Cottage, at 1300 Summerland Avenue, is still standing, although

it has been extensively remodeled.

“He was his own architect and builder,” Eaton recalled, “and almost his own mason and painter.

He used to be seen here and there and everywhere, superintending and working with his own hands.”

Visitors described the home as “a tasteful, comfortable, not to say elegant structure,” with a neatly tended vegetable garden sloping down to the lake.

Lawrence took intense interest in the planting of a second citrus grove at Hudson’s Bay, experimenting with innovative techniques in fertilizing, mulching and irrigation.

Visitors remarked on the orderly appearance of the grove, with its trees planted in hexagonal forms to maximize space and its neatly mowed grass used as mulch between them.

They also noted the principles that underlay his method: “He rightly thinks that a small grove well cared for, will give infinitely more satisfactory results than a greater number of neglected trees. … Ten trees well cared for will give better results than a hundred neglected ones.”

It was during this period that Lawrence formed a close friendship with Loring A. Chase, co-proprietor of Chapman & Chase, later the Winter Park Company and now the Winter Park Land Company.

A Chicago resident suffering from severe catarrh and bronchitis, Chase sought to restore his health with a several-month stay in Orange County. But he discovered a real estate investment opportunity of grand proportions.

Chase and his business partner, Oliver Chapman of Massachusetts, bought more than 1,000 acres from homesteaders and began to plot the town that would become Winter Park, which they envisioned as a posh winter resort featuring “a collection of beautiful villas in the midst of orange groves, upon acre-lots running to the shores of crystal lakes,” and “a dozen or more of large, firstclass hotels along the 10 miles of lake frontage.”

Lawrence helped to market Winter Park, allowing his name and testimonials to be used in sales brochures. Early advertisements featured references to Lawrence as one of the area’s three “millionaire” settlers, and quoted him as saying that the region “is one of the most lovely and healthy spots to be found in any clime.”

As perhaps his greatest contribution, Lawrence arranged for his friend, President Arthur, to visit Winter Park during a whistle-stop tour of South Florida in April 1883. Lawrence worked closely with Chase to orchestrate the visit: “Think will be at Park Station nine forty-five,”

COURTESY OF THE ROLLINS COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Lawrence worked closely with Winter Park co-founder Loring Chase to orchestrate a visit to the town by President Chester A. Arthur. The Winter Park booster telegraphed instructions (left) to his friend regarding Arthur’s arrival.

he telegraphed Chase from Sanford the day before. “Have carriages on street between my grove and Beasley’s. Have my buckboard first, yours next. Twenty in party. Walk through my grove.

Have south gate open. Take carriage at east gate.

President refuses introduction. Too nervous. All can see him who like. L. Lawrence.”

Lawrence accompanied Arthur on a brief tour of his Hudson’s Bay grove, followed by a

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procession through town in the Chapman & Chase buckboard.

Arthur’s visit, orchestrated by Lawrence, generated valuable publicity for the town-building venture. “The Prettiest Town of All,” boasted one dispatch from the Albany Times-Union correspondent: “Winter Park is a charming little village on a high crest of land overlooking the lake, with cottages, built only in the most modern and

attractive styles, and commodious and comfortable hotel kept by a Mr. Rogers. It has a station on the South Florida Railroad two miles South of Maitland. … The town, the surroundings, the people and their reception of us were alike charming and delightful.”

A local correspondent hailed it as “an important day in history of Winter Park.” Indeed, the role of Lawrence in organizing it secured his status as an honored benefactor and patron. In 1885, he formalized his relationship with the town by purchasing shares in the Winter Park Company.

Like Lawrence before them, Chapman and Chase anticipated the need for African-Americans — the region’s primary labor force — to tend the villas and groves, staff the fine hotels and transport the guests via carriage.

Looking to incorporate a black residential area into their town plan, they found a successful model in Lawrence’s Eatonville subdivision in Maitland.

An 1883 map of Winter Park shows small, tightly packed “Negro lots” west of the railroad in Hannibal Square — “an excellent location, on the outskirts of town, selected by Mr. Chase for exclusive occupancy by the colored people.”

While Chapman and Chase didn’t include moral provisions of the type employed by Lawrence, they did impose provisions designed to attract only those committed to improving the lots with homes and supporting the town-building enterprise.

“A rule adopted by the proprietors of Winter Park,” a correspondent reported after touring the town with Chase, “is that no lot shall be owned by a colored person who does not, within a reasonable amount of time, erect a residence thereon … to invite a sufficiency of that class of population to meet the necessary demands for menial labor, and at the same time to prevent an influx of the idle and vicious.”

A Winter Park map and brochure listed a dozen black families among the residents as of 1883.

African-American property ownership served a political purpose — perhaps obvious to Chase and Lawrence — for the Republican Party and its dreams of establishing a foothold in the former slave states of the South.

The taxpaying male residents of Lawrence’s Eatonville and Chase’s Hannibal Square were eligible to participate as voters in the 1885 incorporation of Maitland, and the 1887 incorporation of Winter Park, respectively.

In both cases, African-Americans provided crucial votes for incorporation and, for a brief time at

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least, held elected town offices alongside whites.

Black property owners played a particularly decisive role in the 1887 incorporation of Winter Park, providing crucial swing votes to a Republican Party bloc that governed the town and guarded its racially inclusive boundaries for roughly five years.

Of the 58 names on the list of town incorporators, as published in the Winter Park Advocate, at least 20 — more than a third — were AfricanAmerican. Two of the incorporators — Walter B. Simpson and Frank R. Israel — served as Winter Park Aldermen.

Their participation as black community representatives was neither accidental nor at odds with the founders’ intentions. As Loring A. Chase explained in an 1890 address: “It will be noted that the presence of two intelligent, industrious colored citizens, in aldermanic chairs, indicated the manner in which the people of this community propose to settle the great race problem. The motto is ‘Let justice be done, though the Heavens fall.’ Remembering that the more justice is done, the less likely the Heavens will be to fall.”

Sadly, though perhaps inevitably, the demonstrated ability of African-American voters to swing elections to Republicans in Winter Park prompted an exclusionary racist backlash.

Unable to win at the local level, a local faction persuaded Democrats in Tallahassee to remove Hannibal Square from incorporated Winter Park through the gerrymandering of town boundaries in 1893.

Not until 1925, when Winter Park needed to boost its population to achieve city status, did Hannibal Square rejoin the city. By then, however, Jim Crow era poll taxes and other measures had effectively disfranchised most black voters throughout Florida and the South.

The brief era of biracial governance lasted just over a year in Maitland, and may have precipitated the separation of Eatonville from Maitland in 1887.

Folklorist and novelist Hurston, whose family lived in Eatonville during its early decades, offers the most detailed — if unverifiable — account of Eatonville’s separation from Maitland in her autobiography.

She writes that the white, Northern-born, emancipationist founders of Maitland — “the Eatons, Lawrences, Vanderpools, Hurds, Halls, the Hills, Yateses, and Galloways, and all the rest, including Bishop Whipple, head of the Minnesota diocese” — welcomed the participation of eligible

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black self-governance against a foreboding backdrop of racial violence and systematic exclusion.

LAWRENCE’S LEGACY

Lawrence didn’t live to see the establishment of Eatonville, nor did he live to see Winter Park incorporated.

African-American voters in the first local election.

Surprisingly, perhaps shockingly, Hurston writes, the two candidates put up by the African-American community won the top two town offices; Tony Taylor and Joseph Clark — the first two men to purchase property in Lawrence’s subdivision — became mayor and town marshal, respectively.

Hurston maintains that African-American success at the polls and a year in office spurred dreams of Negro self-governance — and led Clark to push for the incorporation of Eatonville as the first statechartered “all Negro town.”

On August 15, 1887, 27 African-American men who resided within the village — Clark, Taylor and Rickets among them — met at the St. Lawrence Odd Fellows Hall and signed a charter of incorporation for Eatonville, Florida, officially transforming Eatonville into a self-governed “black township.”

Hurston portrayed the separation of Eatonville from Maitland as entirely voluntary and free of coercion. It seems more likely — given prevailing racial attitudes — that the participation of AfricanAmerican voters in Maitland’s municipal elections unnerved white residents, and led to discussions of separation as a mutually beneficial solution to the so-called “race problem.”

Indeed, the second issue of the Eatonville Speaker presented the town’s mission as equal parts selfgovernance and self-preservation. On page one appeared an advertisement that read: “Colored People of the United States! Solve the Great Race Problem by Securing a Home in Eatonville, Florida, A Negro City Governed by Negroes.”

On page four appeared a first-hand account of a near-lynching in Sanford. Eatonville boosters, on the other hand, presented a utopian vision of

Lawrence did not live to see the establishment of the independent black township of Eatonville or its depiction, in early promotional literature, as “A Negro Paradise” and a solution to “The Great Race Problem” in the U.S. Nor did he live to see Winter Park incorporated under Republican rule, thanks to African-American voters from Hannibal Square. He fell ill during a visit to Florida in 1886 and died in Utica of “old age, together with disease of the heart, liver and kidneys,” in September of that year.

When word of his death reached Central Florida, eulogies from friends and countrymen whose causes Lawrence had befriended poured in.

In Eatonville, the St. Lawrence A.M.E. Church was ordered draped in mourning. Quarterman, the newly installed pastor, declared that “the colored people of Maitland had lost a friend. There will always be a green spot in the A.M.E. Connection in memory of the Hon. Lewis Lawrence.”

Chase wrote that Lawrence “was one of the earliest and staunchest friends of Winter Park.

His cheery voice was ever heard in commendation of the enterprise; his busy hand did valiant work for the infant town; his well-filled purse was always wide open in aid of all its religious educational and social schemes.”

At a public meeting, the people of Maitland adopted a tribute to “one of their earliest and staunchest friends ... In him good business qualities and good Christian virtues found no conflict, but worked in unison.”

Today, Lawrence is little more than a footnote to the 19th century abolitionist, temperance and civil rights movements he supported, and all but unknown in the three Central Florida towns he helped build.

Yet his story is worthy retelling, if only to remind us that the struggle for racial equality and democracy has deep roots in this sandy soil — and that the least and the most powerful among us share common visions of home, community and prosperity.

Editor’s Note: Scot French is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida.

He has recently been studying Eatonville, and is currently writing a book on the town’s history. He was one of Winter Park Magazine’s Most Influential People in 2016.

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Eatonville

in the 1930s

COURTESY OF THE ART AND HISTORY MUSEUMS – MAITLAND

Portfolio by Andre Smith

The conté crayon, watercolor and oil paintings of Eatonville on the following pages are the work of architect and artist J. Andre Smith (1880-1959), who recorded scenes of daily life in the historic black township shortly after establishing the Maitland Art Center — originally called the Research Studio — in the mid-1930s.

These rare images of Eatonville as it looked more than 80 years ago are reproduced, for the first time, courtesy of the Art & History Museums — Maitland.

A child of American parents, Smith was born in Hong Kong and raised in New York and Connecticut. He attended Cornell University, where he trained as an architect.

After working for a time as a draftsman, he served in World War I as a captain in Company A, 40th Regiment of the Corps of Engineers, which was a cadre of camouflage artists and designers. He was also a member of the American Expeditionary Force, one of eight soldier-artists called upon to document the war for the U.S. government.

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Smith, who began visiting Florida in the early 1930s, formed a close friendship with Annie Russell (left), a retired stage actress who directed the drama program at Rollins College. He began building the Maitland Art Center — then called the Research Studio — in the mid-1930s. The campus opened in 1938.

Eatonville are unknown, but may be related to his friendship with celebrated folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (Of Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dust Tracks on a Road), who lived there as a child.

At some point, he developed a friendship with Hurston, a childhood resident of Eatonville whose celebrated works introduced the community and its people to literary audiences worldwide through Dust Tracks on a Road.

It’s known that Hurston visited Eatonville in 1935 — the same year that Smith created his sketchbook drawings. Perhaps the artist joined Hurston and folklorist Alan Lomax as they documented life and lore under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Hurston later discussed with Smith her ideas for a Folklore Village in Eatonville. Smith even prepared a preliminary architectural sketch of the site as he envisioned it.

Though the Folklore Village project never came to fruition, its spirit lives on today in Eatonville’s annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts & Humanities, which features foods, crafts and literary-cultural activities rooted in African-American history and culture.

COURTESY OF THE ART AND HISTORY MUSEUMS – MAITLAND (RENDERING) AND THE ROLLINS COLLEGE ARCHIVES (RUSSELL)

Smith, who began visiting Florida in the early 1930s, eventually bought property for a winter home and studio on Lake Sybelia. He formed a close friendship with Annie Russell, a retired stage actress who directed the drama program at Rollins College, and designed a number of sets for productions at the on-campus theater bearing Russell’s name.

Disappointed in the region’s lack of support for modern art, Smith made plans for a residential, year-round “Lab-Gallery” that would encourage artistic experimentation in a “monastic” studio environment. With financial support from his patron, philanthropist Mary Louise Curtis Bok, he built the Research Studio and directed it from 1938 until his death in 1959.

In designing the complex, Smith drew upon a wide range of cultural and religious influences from around the world — Greco-Roman, Mayan, Aztec, European, African and Asian. He created elaborate reliefs and sculptures from concrete using a method he developed himself.

Smith’s conté crayon etchings and watercolors of Eatonville date to 1935; he also made several oil-on-masonite paintings of similar scenes that date to 1940. The circumstances of his visits to

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Untitled Eatonville street scene, 1935 Conté crayon and watercolor

Untitled Eatonville farm, 1935 Conté crayon and watercolor

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Untitled St. Lawrence A.M.E. Church, 1935 Conté crayon and watercolor

Untitled Eatonville street scene, 1935 Conté crayon and watercolor S PRING 2 0 1 8 | W INTER PARK MAGAZ IN E

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ILLUSTRATION BY JIM ZAHNISER

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THE SAINTLY LEGACY OF FRED ROGERS He Preached a Message of Inherent Worth and Unconditional Lovability.

By Jonathan Merritt

A

fter Amy Melder became a Christian at the age of 6, she set out to evangelize everyone she cared about. One of the names on the top of her list was a person whom she’d never actually met: Fred Rogers.

Amy was a frequent viewer of PBS’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and had formed a deep connection to the gentle host who made her feel “safe and accepted in his tiny staged living room.”

So she penned Rogers, who died in 2003, a letter to “make sure he knew he was going to heaven.” Within weeks, she received a lengthy response from a man who personally answered every piece of fan mail he received.

He thanked her for the colorful drawing she sent him, which “is special because you made it for me.” And then he addressed the matter that most concerned Amy: “You told me that you have accepted Jesus as your Savior. It means a lot to me to know that. And, I appreciated the Scripture verse that you sent. I am an ordained Presbyterian minister, and I want you to know that Jesus is important to me, too. I hope that God’s love and peace come through my work on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Fred Rogers was an ordained minister, but he was no televangelist, and he never tried to impose his beliefs on anyone. Behind the cardigans, though, was a man of deep faith.

Using puppets rather than a pulpit, he preached a message of inherent worth and unconditional lovability to young viewers, encouraging them to express their emotions with honesty. The effects were darn near supernatural.

He was Protestant. But if Protestants had saints, Mister Rogers might already have been canonized.

When Rogers decided to pursue a career in television, it wasn’t fame he sought. While watching TV during seminary, he “saw people throwing pies

at each other’s faces,” which he believed was both “demeaning behavior” and a missed opportunity.

In the wake of World War II, thousands of veterans returned from battle and started families. These shell-shocked heroes risked creating a generation of emotionally stunted children. Television was a perfect vehicle for teaching kids to cope with life’s difficulties and express their feelings, but it was used mostly for mindless entertainment.

“After graduating from seminary, the Presbyterian Church didn’t know what to do with Fred,” says Amy Hollingsworth, author of The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers. “So the presbytery gave him a special commission to be an evangelist to children through the media.”

Fred’s faith surfaced in subtle, indirect ways that most viewers might miss, but it infused all he did. He believed “the space between the television set and the viewer is holy ground,” but he trusted God to do the heavy lifting.

The wall of his office featured a framed picture of the Greek word for “grace,” a constant reminder of his belief that he could use television “for the broadcasting of grace through the land.” Before entering that office each day, Rogers would pray, “Dear God, let some word that is heard be yours.”

Rogers told kids they mattered, that they were worthy of love, and that emotions were to be embraced, not buried. He spoke to children like grownups, and helped them tackle topics such as anger, trust, honesty, courage and sadness.

“The world is not always a kind place,” Rogers once said. “That’s something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it’s something they really need our help to understand.”

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood helped young viewers process stress incurred during intense periods of cultural upheaval. When it would have been easy to S PRING 2 0 1 8 | W INT ER PARK MAGAZ IN E

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demonize villains, Rogers instead forced viewers to tussle with a question Jesus himself was asked in the gospel of Luke: “Who is my neighbor?”

While the question felt different depending on the circumstances, Rogers’ answer never wavered.

“His definition of ‘neighbor’ was whomever you happen to be with at the moment, especially if they are in need,” Hollingsworth said.

Rogers took an artisan’s approach to television production. Each show was designed to meet the psychological needs of children by giving them “a neighborhood expression of care,” in consultation with a team of experts. Rogers thought of himself as something of a surrogate parent, which is why he often utilized puppets and rarely featured other children—he didn’t want to create a sense of “sibling rivalry.”

His hard work helped his show hold its own against flashier, more expensive children’s programs in competing time slots. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood pushed beyond surface-level entertainment and instilled children with a sense of joy, peace and kindness.

Researchers who compared viewers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with viewers of Sesame Street even found that Fred’s fans developed a greater level of patience.

In 1969, The Atlantic documented how the dialogue on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood often felt so personal that it would trigger a “byplay” from young viewers, in which they “may respond vocally to a question and Rogers, anticipating the reply, may follow through to his next point.”

But for some viewers, the connections went even deeper.

In 1998, Esquire reported the story of a young viewer of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with an acute case of autism. The child had never spoken a word until one day he uttered, “X the Owl,” which was the name of one of Mister Rogers’ most popular puppets.

And the boy had never looked his father in the eye either, until the day his dad said, “Let’s go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.” After this, the boy began speaking and reading, which inspired the father to visit Fred Rogers personally to thank him for saving his son’s life.

Lauren Tewes, the actress who played the cruise director on the television show Love Boat, left the show in 1984 while struggling with a cocaine addiction. One particularly dark morning, the actress says she glanced at her television screen and saw the signature opening of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Something inexplicable happened inside of

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In 1991, Fred Rogers, Class of 1951, was honored with a stone on the Rollins College Walk of Fame in ceremonies overseen by President Rita Bornstein.

Rogers, arguably the college’s most famous graduate, formed close, lifelong friendships on campus and in the community. Below is the motto, carved on a wall near Strong Hall, that inspired Rogers as a student.

her, which Tewes later attributed to “God speaking to me through the instrument of Mister Rogers.” She spent the next several decades sober.

Later in Rogers’ life, he recounted the story of a child who was being abused by his biological parents, who reportedly “wouldn’t even give him a winter blanket and wouldn’t give him a bed to sleep in.” Through encountering Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the child began to hope that there were kind people in the world and became convinced that he too should be treated with respect.

The child called an abuse hotline and was rescued. If the story doesn’t seem exceptional enough, consider that the hotline operator who answered the phone adopted the boy.

These are anecdotal accounts, impossible to verify. But they’re of a piece with the stories often told about saints. In that, they reflect the remarkable connection that so many viewers formed with Rogers, and the extent to which many came to regard him not just as an entertainer, but as something very much more.

Rogers affected the lives of millions of children, and I count myself among them. On many afternoons, I sat in front of a television screen where Mister Rogers told me that I was lovable

and I was enough. He said he was my friend, and I believed him. My life still bears the fingerprints of his influence.

I can still hear him signing off his show similar to the way he concluded his letter to Amy Melder: “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There is no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” Some have suggested that this message sought to instill children with a sense of self-importance, but to believe that is to fundamentally misunderstand Fred Rogers. At the core of Rogers’ mission was the paradoxical Christian belief that the way to gain one’s life is to give it away.

“The underlying message of the Neighborhood,” Rogers once said, “is that if somebody cares about you, it’s possible that you’ll care about others. ‘You are special, and so is your neighbor’ — that part is essential: that you’re not the only special person in the world. The person you happen to be with at the moment is loved, too.”

He was right, of course, that everyone is special. But so was he. There was also no person in the world like Fred Rogers, and given the current state of American television, there might never be again. For nearly 40 years, he entered homes to bandage broken psyches, mend fences of division and preach peace.

Mister Rogers was not just special; he was a saint. He’ll never be officially offered that title, and he’d probably want it that way. Instead, he has been canonized in the hearts of his viewers — Saint Fred, the patron saint of neighborliness.

Jonathan Merritt is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a senior columnist for Religion News Service. He has written more than 3,000 published articles in such publications as The New York Times, USA Today, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. He is the author of Jesus Is Better Than You Imagined and A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars.

Copyright 2015, the Atlantic Media Company, as first published in The Atlantic. All rights reserved. Distributed

by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

“

PARTING WORDS I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger: I like you just the way you are. And what’s more, I’m so grateful to you for helping the children in your life to know that you’ll do everything you can to keep them safe and to help them express their feelings in ways that will bring healing in many different neighborhoods.”

— From the final episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

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WINTER PARK WAS HIS NEIGHBORHOOD

IMAGES COURTESY OF ROLLINS COLLEGE

The sneakers and sweater that Rogers wore on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood are displayed in the Rollins College Department of Archives and Special Collections at Olin Library. Nearby, in the lobby of Tiedtke Concert Hall, hangs a large portrait of Rogers by local artist Don Sondag.

Fred Rogers — or, as his fans knew him, Mister Rogers — was born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. But Winter Park claims him as one of its own, in part because he graduated from Rollins College in 1951 with a degree in music composition.

It was at Rollins where he met his future wife, Joanne Byrd, and participated in an array of campus activities, serving on the chapel staff and as a member of the Community Service Club, the Student Music Guild, the French Club, the Welcoming Committee, the After Chapel Club and the Alpha Phi Lambda fraternity.

But he also formed enduring friendships in the city, and visited here regularly for the remainder of his life.

When in Winter Park, he nearly always dropped by the campus, swimming in the pool nearly every day — he was an intramural swimmer in his college days — and sometimes slipping into classes that interested him.

He counted John Sinclair, chairman of the Department of Music and artistic director of the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park, as one of his closest friends. Rogers’ nephew, renowned composer Daniel Crozier, continues the legacy as a professor of music theory at the college.

Suddenly, it seems — perhaps because of the turbulent times in which we live — Mister Rogers is more popular than ever. Certainly, his message of kindness and civility, which may have seemed corny to cynics 20 years ago, has never been more timely.

In 2018, marking the 50th anniversary of Rogers’ iconic children’s program, PBS broadcast a poignant documentary called Mister Rogers: It’s You I Like.

Another documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and will be released to theaters later this year. A U.S. postage stamp bearing his likeness was recently unveiled.

Oh, and there’s more. Tom Hanks has been signed to star in a bigbudget Tristar biopic, You Are My Friend, inspired by a real-life friendship between Rogers and journalist Tom Junod.

In the film, Junod is shown as a hard-bitten reporter who reluctantly accepts an assignment to write a profile on Rogers for Esquire — and finds his worldview transformed in the process. The article, now considered a classic of magazine journalism, ran in 1998.

A release date for the film has not yet been announced. In the meantime, though, here are five things you may not have known about Fred Rogers:

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1

HIS TESTIMONY HELPED SAVE THE VCR AND PAVED THE WAY FOR NETFLIX.

2

HE WAS INSPIRED BY THE “LIFE IS FOR SERVICE” MOTTO HE SAW AT ROLLINS.

3

HE SPOKE AT A KID-FRIENDLY SPEED OF 124 WORDS PER MINUTE.

4

HIS SWEATER AND SNEAKERS ARE HOUSED IN THE CAMPUS LIBRARY.

5

HE WEIGHED EXACTLY 143 POUNDS FOR THE LAST 30 YEARS OF HIS LIFE.

In 1976, Universal Studios filed a lawsuit against Sony Corporation to halt sale of the Betamax — the precursor to the VCR — claiming that home recording would damage television and film producers. When the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983, Rogers testified for Sony, saying he didn’t object to people taping his shows and watching them at a more convenient time — particularly if they were able to do so in a family setting. The court — which cited Rogers’ testimony — ruled in favor of Sony, and the case has served as a precedent for the popular recording and streaming technologies we enjoy today.

The talented music composition major — who transferred to Rollins from Dartmouth — took a photo of the inspirational engraving, which is on a wall near Strong Hall, and carried it in his wallet for years. It was finally framed and prominently placed on his desk.

According to research, one reason why children were so captivated by Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood could be that Rogers’ speech was the perfect pace for children ages 3 to 5 to process. The average adult prefers to listen to speech at a pace of 150 to 160 words per minute.

Rogers famously wore zip-front cardigans that were knitted by his mother. A blue cardigan and a pair of sneakers are among Rollins’ most treasured possessions, and may be seen in the college’s Department of Archives and Special Collections in Olin Library. Another cardigan — a red one — is kept at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Rogers lived a healthy life and was disciplined in his daily routine. Journalist Tom Junod explained that Rogers found beauty in his weight of 143 pounds because “the number 143 means ‘I love you.’ It takes one letter to say ‘I’ and four letters to say ‘love’ and three letters to say ‘you.’ One hundred and forty-three.”

A version of this list originally appeared in Rollins 360, the campus magazine.

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Restorations Porcelain Crown & Bridge Implants Root Canal Removable Dentures Extractions

HELLO, SPRING HANNIBAL SQUARE IS THE SETTING FOR THE SEASON’S LATEST LOOKS. PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAFAEL TONGOL STYLING BY MARIANNE ILUNGA | MAKEUP AND HAIR BY ELSIE KNAB MODELS: WILLIE DEMI AND CHRIS SCHUH FROM MODELSCOUT/REPPREZENT

76 W I N T E R P A R K M A G A ZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

Willie Demi wears a red and pink flower dress by Chiara Boni ($750) from Neiman Marcus Mall at Millenia. Her red and pink flower appliqué ($5,200) and her light pink round sunglasses ($520), both by Fendi, are also from Neiman Marcus Mall at Millenia. Her red suede heels by Avec Les Filles ($158) are from Tuni Winter Park. Chris Schuh wears a plaid jacket by Boss ($645) a skull print T-shirt by Robert Graham ($128), and black motorcycle jeans by Pierre Balmain ($750), all from Neiman Marcus Mall at Millenia. He also wears camel color suede boots

by YSL ($1,045) and a red karma bead bracelet by John Hardy ($395), also from Neiman Marcus Mall at Millenia.

Location: Hannibal’s on the Square.

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Chris wears a white floral shirt by Robert Graham ($228) and a lime green half-zip sweater by Peter Millar ($145), both from John Craig on Park Avenue. Â He also wears lightweight beige color denim pants by Citizen of Humanity ($198) from Current on Park Avenue.

Location: Hannibal Square.

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Chris wears a striped black and white shirt by Rag & Bone ($150), along with a pair of Navy pants ($245) and a dark blue bomber jacket ($495), both by Theory.

All are from Neiman Marcus Mall at Millenia, while the white Converse shoes are the model’s own. Willie wears a pastel blue print top by Alice McCall ($260) from Tuni Winter Park. She also wears a pair of high-waisted flared jeans by Citizens of Humanity ($258) and a statement ring by Geode ($68), both from Tuni Winter Park. Her light pink chain bag by YSL ($1,550) and pastel flower detail sandals by Sophia Webster ($595) are both from Neiman Marcus Mall at Millenia. Location: Hannibal’s on the Square.

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Willie wears white wide-leg pants with pleat details ($238) and a black and white cashmere boat neck top ($378), both from Eileen Fisher Winter Park. She also wears platform sneakers by Kendall and Kylie ($125) from Tuni Winter Park. Her bright yellow shoulder bag by Chloe ($1,690) and black raffia fringe earrings

by Oscar de la Renta ($390) are both from Neiman Marcus Mall at Millenia. Location: Shady Park.

80 W I N T E R P A R K M A G AZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

Willie wears a white eyelet jumpsuit by Alice McCall ($390) from Tuni Winter Park. She carries a gold metallic jacket by Lamarque ($515) and a gold sequins clutch by YSL ($1,550), both from Neiman Marcus Mall at Millenia. Chris wears a blue polka dot shirt by Stone Rose ($125), a blue blazer by John Craig, ($1,695), and a pair of white jeans by DL 1961 ($178), all from John Craig on Park Avenue. He also wears an electric blue leather bracelet by Miansai ($98) and a pair of blue mirrored sunglasses ($175), both from Current on Park Avenue. Location: West New England Avenue, in front of Rifle Paper Company.

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DINING

I

“

Derek Perez (standing) and Brandon McGlamery, of Luma and Prato fame, are the adventurous culinary entrepreneurs behind Luke’s Kitchen + Bar in Maitland, which offers up tasty old-school fare.

GOOD FOOD, HONESTLY As Luke’s celebrates its first year, the Maitland eatery is finding its stride with creatively comforting fare prepared by perfectionists.

BY RONA GINDIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAFAEL TONGOL

82 W I N T E R P A R K M A G AZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

’m not a glamour job kind of guy,” says Derek Perez.

“I like to make honest food that’s not cheffed up.”

Say what? For a full decade, this 6-foot-5 hipster — with gouged earlobes and a sculpted beard — has been transforming luxury foods into works of culinary art at Luma on Park, the Avenue’s foodiest dining room.

From Luma’s exhibition kitchen, Perez pampered Winter Parkers with fanciful, inventive fare of the sort that defines “cheffed up.”

Today, without a whiff of irony, Perez waxes poetic about the hamburgers at Luke’s Kitchen + Bar in Maitland — you can just call it “Luke’s” — where he’s now executive chef. “It has no foams or gasses that cover it up,” he boasts. “It’s an honest, delicious burger.”

That burger — which is indeed honest and delicious — is a menu staple at Luke’s, which describes itself as “classic American.” There, Perez applies the advanced culinary skills he mastered at Luma to somewhat less lofty old-school fare.

That means guests of a certain age will get the chance to revisit with favorites from past decades: crab cakes and French dip sandwiches, prime rib dinners and — this is more exciting than it sounds — potato chips with onion dip.

The menu is, in fact, chef driven if not cheffed up, considering Perez’s almost religious devotion to quality. And, meals are served in a fittingly sturdy building that locals remember as having been a Steak & Ale location for decades.

But this is no Steak & Ale. Guests are seated in graybrown banquettes, while glass lampshades line the inviting bar. Together with a raw metal chandelier and a bit of swanky mid-century modern seating here and there, the interior is unpretentious but welcoming. A spacious patio invites alfresco dining.

Perez has taken a new direction in terms of cuisine, yet his employers remain the same. Luke’s is the third restaurant owned by Park Lights Hospitality Group, which brought Luma to the area in 2005 and the modern-Italian Prato seven years later.

James Beard regional semifinalist Brandon McGlamery is chef/partner, with responsibility for all three eateries, while Tim Noelke manages the managers. Brandon and Tim can be seen in all three restaurants regularly. Derek is always at Luke’s.

At Luke’s, what constitutes classic American cuisine is flexible — and we say that with unabashed glee. The chipsand-dip appetizer, for example, shame the ’60s version we’re accustomed to. In our home, Ruffles and a bowl of sour cream blended with dry Lipton onion soup mix were laid out whenever company arrived.

At Luke’s, however, the spuds are thinly sliced Idaho potatoes fried in-house and seasoned with truffle salt and essence. For the dip, crème fraiche — a frothy, tangy, sour cream-like wonder — is blended with chives, onion and garlic powders, “and a lot of love,” Perez says.

The burger at Luke’s is to die for. “It has no foams or gasses that cover it up,” says Executive Chef Derek Perez. “It’s an honest, delicious burger.” It’s also a menu staple at the classic American eatery.

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DINING

Fresh, Florida Cuisine in an Award-Winning Hotel Enjoy seasonal specialties surrounded by museum-quality art and a beautiful Mediterranean-style atmosphere.

Relax on our patio and enjoy the sights and sounds of Winter Park.

Luke’s rotisserie chicken is prepared on a $30,000 vertical rotisserie cooker, where the dripping fat from one glazes another until each bird is moist and ready for slicing and plating.

Accolades 2017 Travel + Leisure Top 100 Hotels in the World 2017 Travel + Leisure #2 Top City Hotel in the Continental United States 2017 Conde Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards #1 Hotel in Florida For dining reservations, please call 407-998-8089 Visit us at www.TheAlfondInn.com or on Facebook

84 W I N T E R P A R K M A GAZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

The crab cakes are straightforward. “It’s simply made with the very best crab you can possibly find,” he says. “There’s not a lot of filler.” The seared golden disks aren’t cheap, but you get what you pay for.

Luke’s rotisserie chicken is a splurge compared to what you’d grab at the grocery store. Here, the chefs make a brine of peppercorns and mint, then let the raw poultry sit in what is essentially a mild mint tea for 24 hours. That way, the subtle flavor seeps all the way through the flesh.

Before cooking, the chicken is air-dried for at least half a day so the skin will be crispy. Only then are the birds positioned on the bell-like holders of a $30,000 vertical rotisserie cooker, where the dripping fat from one glazes another until each clucker is moist and ready for slicing and plating.

This gizmo is so advanced that McGlamery

likens it to a Tesla.

But let’s get back to that burger. Perez and McGlamery are so keen on its perfection that they finish each other’s sentences while talking about its creation. Then again, they often finish one another’s sentences. That’s what happens when you’ve worked side-by-side with someone for 11 years.

The how-it’s-made conversation begins with Perez saying that “there are no magic tricks.” Then you hear about how the chefs tested 25 different meat blends before whittling it down to eight, then one. “Different muscles and textures work together for the best flavor,” McGlamery adds.

The winning combo involves a short rib — a special ribeye that’s trimmed between the bones when it’s frenched, says Perez, so it has high fat content — and a stew meat blend.

It’s Florida, after all, so you may choose to dine alfresco on Luke’s spacious patio, which features an indoor/ outdoor bar. Lake Lily Park is just across U.S. 17-92.

All the Flavor Without the Pretension At family-owned Moonlight Pizza & Italian Cuisine, we understand life is hectic.

Work, daily commutes, dentist and doctor appointments — add kids to the mix and it is a wonder you have time to breathe, let alone cook an honest meal.

We put the emphasis on preparing real food for real people.

We believe the best food comes from focusing on flavor — not on bells and whistles. Our philosophy is to offer delicious food and a comfortable experience for dine-in guests — and easy, convenient off-premises ordering with hassle-free pick-up and delivery.

As food and wine connoisseur Ted Allen says, “People want honest, flavorful food. Not some show-off meal that takes days to prepare.”

Limited T ime Offers

n n n

10% off entire check $2.50 off any large pizza Buy one entrée receive second entrée for half off

1341 Howell Branch Road Winter Park, 32789 (Near the 7-Eleven at the corner of Howell Branch Road and Temple Trail)

407-775-6746 Dine in or order online for pickup at

moonlightpizzaanditaliangrill.com (407) 775-6746 1341 Howell Branch Road Winter Park, FL 32789

www.moonlightpizzaanditaliangrill.com

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DINING

It’s hard to know where to begin when recommending what you ought to try at Luke’s, which boasts an inviting bar (above) in its unpretentious but welcoming dining room. There’s the okra with sea salt, olive oil and lemon juice (top); crab cakes that are actually made from crab (above center); and hearty ice cream (above right), if you have room for dessert.

That’s not all. “The dense muscle holds it all together, and we grind butter into it — unsalted — that gives it the sear that locks in the flavor, and makes it a moister, richer burger.”

I don’t remember if that last quote came from Perez or McGlamery. All I heard was a shared passion for burgers.

Luke’s has a wood-fired grill, and above that is a smokebox through which fish, shellfish and vegetables rotate. If the okra with sea salt, olive oil and lemon juice is on the menu, order it even if you dislike okra. It’s that tender and flavorful. Oysters, shishito peppers, chicken wings — you can’t go wrong.

For a lighter bite, check out the raw bar. In addition to oysters on the half shell, options might include shrimp cocktail, or yellowfin tuna on avocado toast with artichoke relish. All are the extreme level of fresh that you’d expect from this team.

Desserts are created by Brian Cernell, the pastry guru who wowed guests for years at Luma and Prato and now Luke’s as well. The hearty ice

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creams are especially satisfying. Key lime tart, banana pecan cake and other reinvented sweets rotate through the menu.

Like every new restaurant, Luke’s has had its misses. The twice-baked potato came and went unloved by the masses, sadly for those of us who hadn’t yet tried it. And the raw bar was far less popular than the chefs had hoped — so they’ve trimmed the offerings.

But now that the restaurant is a year old, the team knows what guests like. They learn it daily, in fact. Every morning, they each receive a spreadsheet detailing every item that was sent back to the kitchen and comped the day before, along with an explanation.

“Everything is under a microscope,” Perez says, before McGlamery pipes in, “We listen to all the complaints, and we take it in.”

Often, customer feedback results in major changes. Guests requested brunch and a happy hour. Now, Luke’s has a large food and beverage happy hour menu seven days a week, from 3 p.m.

to 6 p.m., and brunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

There was also feedback that prices were too high. The chefs trimmed the numbers “without ever sacrificing quality,” McGlamery says.

Some aspects of Luke’s never change, though.

“The sunsets are awesome,” Perez says, sitting on the 50-seat patio that faces Lake Lily across U.S. 17-92. He’s right about that.

Luke’s was a change for the Park Lights Hospitality folks, who wanted to open a third restaurant different enough that it wouldn’t impact business at Luma and Prato.

“We had the operations, the systems and the teamwork,” McGlamery notes. “This time, we went for food that is a lot more approachable.

It’s good honest food.”

Honestly.

LUKE’S KITCHEN + BAR 640 S. Orlando Avenue, Maitland, 32751 (407) 674-2400 eatatlukes.com

3907 ORANGE LAKE DR • ORLANDO LAKEFRONT • 3/3 • $599,000 MAITLAND MIDDLE • WINTER PARK HS

513 BRECHIN DRIVE • WINTER PARK 3/2 2030 SQ FT • $459,000

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1540 IBIS COURT • WINTER PARK 684 SQ FT PATIO • 3/2.1 • $700,000

2206 PARK MAITLAND • MAITLAND $279,500

SOLD

SOLD

1311 CHAPMAN CIRCLE • WINTER PARK $760,000

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1761 VIA VENETIA • WINTER PARK $1,200,000

1111 VIA LUGANO • WINTER PARK $1,410,000

Catherine D’Amico 407.252.3210 catherine@fanniehillman.com REALTOR • BROKER ASSOCIATE TOP PRODUCER 29 Years Dedicated to Delivering Postitive Results

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9

Through the Looking Glass

8

Small Business Counsel

321-972-3985

WELCOME TO

Health & Beauty 23 9 12 6

Advanced Park Dental 407-628-0200 Clean Beauty Bar 407-960-3783 Eyes & Optics 407-644-5156 Kendall & Kendall, Hair Color Studio 407-629-2299 17 One Aesthetics 407-720-4242 15 See Eyewear 407-599-5455

Hotels 8 9

The Alfond Inn Park Plaza Hotel

3 11 10 9

California Closets Ethan Allen Monark Premium Appliance The Shade Store

Shoes 25 Rieker Shoes 17 Shoooz On Park Avenue

800-633-0213 407-622-1987 407-636-9725 321-422-1010

Jewelry Alex and Ani Be On Park International Diamond Center Jewelers on the Park Orlando Watch Company Reynolds & Co. Jewelers

407-539-0425 407-647-0110

Specialty Shops 2 5 14 7 15 13 3 13 20 18 19 6

Fig and Julep 321-972-1899 The Ancient Olive 321-972-1899 Brandywine Books 407-644-1711 Christian Science Reading Room 407-647-1559 Frank 407-629-8818 Maureen H. Hall Stationery & Invitations 407-629-6999 New General 321-972-2819 Partridge Tree Gift Shop 407-645-4788 Rifle Paper Co. 407-622-7679 The Spice and Tea Exchange 407-647-7423 Ten Thousand Villages 407-644-8464 Writer’s Block Bookstore 407-592-1498

COLE AVENUE

28

FREE 4 Hr Parking 4th & 5th levels

P

5 23

19

9

CANTON AVENUE

25

300 N

7 16 20 15 18 17 12 21

1

8 3 1 5 4 6 2 9

MAIN STAGE

Central Park

407-740-6003 321-274-6618

LINCOLN AVENUE

West Meadow

MORSE BOULEVARD

P FREE 4 Hour Parking LOT A

5 9

10

LOT B Farmers’ Market

100 N

9

11

6 7 12

12

6

8 10 9 17 100 S

3

WELBOURNE AVENUE P 3-hour Public Parking on ground level

Bank of America Parking Garage

200 S 12

NEW ENGLAND AVENUE

14

8 ALFOND INN

1

13

19

WELCOME 18 CENTER

6

3 1

9

3 BOAT TOUR

2 14 4 1 15 13

11

17

10

3

4

13 14 15

4 8 2 7

Rose Garden

HISTORY MUSEUM P 3-hour Parking

2 1 6

5 Veteran’s Fountain

20

200 N

P

WELBOURNE AVENUE

PENSYLVANIA AVE

11

4 Hour Public Parking

• = Not on Map

NEW ENGLAND AVENUE

4

Park 23 Place

24

Post Office

Weddings

Hannibal Square

400 N

GARFIELD AVE.

10 Luxury Trips 407-622-8747 18 Winter Park Welcome Center 407-644-8281

321-422-0841 407-644-1106 407-629-5531 407-622-0222 407-975-9137 407-645-2278

2

Park Place Garage

Travel Services

The Collection Bridal Winter Park Wedding Co

N 500 N

CHARLES HOSMER MORSE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART 1

Sweets

1 3

3 5

BRANDYWINE SQUARE

1 Ben and Jerry’s 407-325-5163 1 Kilwins Chocolates & Ice Cream 407-622-6292 407-644-3200 14 Peterbrooke Chocolatier

407-998-8090 407-647-1072

Interior Design

11 5 2 15 16 3

8 11 3

Bicycle Parking

4

LYMAN AVENUE

300 S

2

15 16 11

7 19

LYMAN AVENUE

1 P 4-hour Parking

3

INTERLACHEN AVENUE

Bank of America 407-646-3600 F4 Wealth Advisors 407-960-4769 Florida Community Bank 407-622-5000 The Kozlowski CPA Firm LLC 407-381-4432 Moss, Krusick and Associates 407-644-5811

10 9 11 5

FREE 3-HOUR Street Public Parking

Beyond Commercial 407-641-2221 Brandywine Square 407-657-5555 Fannie Hillman + Associates 407-644-1234 Great American Land Management, Inc. 407-645-4131 Keewin Real Property Company 407-645-4400 Kelly Price & Company 407-645-4321 Leading Edge Title 407-636-9866 Olde Town Brokers 407-622-7878 Premier Sotheby’s International Realty 407-644-3295 Re/Max Town Centre 407-367-2000 Winter Park Land Company 407-644-2900 Winter Park Magazine 407-647-0225

KNOWLES AVENUE

5 21 28 5 8

•

24

FREE Public Parking

CENTER STREET

Financial Services

Real Estate Services 7 5 9

P

FREE 4-hour Public Parking

CASA FELIZ

407-647-7277 407-629-0042 407-636-7366 407-960-3778 407-644-8609 407-790-7997 585-766-9886 407-671-4424 407-599-4111 407-335-4548 407-647-7520 321-972-2819 407-645-3939 407-629-7270 407-335-4914 407-381-4432 407-645-3616 407-262-0050 407-951-8039 407-960-3993 407-696-9463

Parking Key

WEST PARK

310 Park South Barnie’s CoffeeKitchen BoiBrazil Churrascaria blu on the avenue Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine Cocina 214 Garp and Fuss Laurel Latin Cuisine Luma on Park Maestro Cucina Napoletana mon petit cheri cafe New General Panera Bread Pannullo’s Italian Restaurant Park Avenue Smoothie Cafe The Parkview Power House Cafe Prato Rome’s Flavours UMI Japanese Restaurant The Wine Room on Park Ave

Winter Park, Florida

Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens 407-647-6294 2 Bach Festival Society of Winter Park 407-646-2182 407-628-8200 2 Casa Feliz 3 Cornell Fine Arts Museum 407-646-2526 1 Morse Museum of American Art 407-645-5311 407-644-4056 3 Scenic Boat Tour • The Winter Park Playhouse 407-645-0145 10 Winter Park History Museum 407-647-2330 5

VIRGINIA AVE

1 1 19 2 2 3 3 6 1 5 4 12 4 2 1 6 7 2 4 7 3

PARK AVENUE

407-621-4200

Museums & Cultural Attractions

NEW YORK AVENUE

Dining

Law Firms

PARK AVENUE

Apparel 14 Arabella 407-636-8343 12 Bebe’s/Liz’s Fashion Experience 407-628-1680 2 Charyli 407-455-1983 321-203-4733 9 Cottonways 6 Current 407-628-1087 1 Evelyn and Arthur 407-740-0030 407-790-4987 13 Forema Boutique 15 The Impeccable Pig 407-636-4043 2 J. McLaughlin 407-960-3965 407-629-7944 7 John Craig Clothier 6 Lilly Pulitzer 407-539-2324 19 Lucky Brand Jeans 407-628-1222 5 Maestro Cucina Napoletana 407-335-4548 4 Max and Marley 407-636-6204 16 Siegel’s Winter Park 407-645-3100 4 Synergy 407-647-7241 321-209-1096 • TADofstyle 12 The Grove 407-740-0022 20 tugboat and the bird 407-647-5437 407-628-1609 17 Tuni

City Hall

6 2 5

P 3-hr Parking

400 S

FREE Public Parking Saturday & Sunday

COMSTOCK AVENUE

10

8 1 7 3 9

COMSTOCK AVENUE

5 2

FAIRBANKS AVENUE

500 S

IN LB 5 A

M UE US KM E S LA PO

ROLLINS COLLEGE 1 2 3

THE PARK AVENUE MERCHANTS ASSOCIATION • EXPERIENCEPARKAVENUE.COM

Health & Beauty 23 9 12 6

Advanced Park Dental 407-628-0200 Clean Beauty Bar 407-960-3783 Eyes & Optics 407-644-5156 Kendall & Kendall, Hair Color Studio 407-629-2299 17 One Aesthetics 407-720-4242 15 See Eyewear 407-599-5455

Hotels 8 9

The Alfond Inn Park Plaza Hotel

3 11 10 9

California Closets Ethan Allen Monark Premium Appliance The Shade Store

800-633-0213 407-622-1987 407-636-9725 321-422-1010

Jewelry Alex and Ani Be On Park International Diamond Center Jewelers on the Park Orlando Watch Company Reynolds & Co. Jewelers

• 24 10 9 11 5 8 11 3

P

FREE 4-hour Public Parking

FREE Public Parking

FREE 3-HOUR Street Public Parking

Beyond Commercial 407-641-2221 Brandywine Square 407-657-5555 Fannie Hillman + Associates 407-644-1234 Great American Land Management, Inc. 407-645-4131 Keewin Real Property Company 407-645-4400 Kelly Price & Company 407-645-4321 Leading Edge Title 407-636-9866 Olde Town Brokers 407-622-7878 Premier Sotheby’s International Realty 407-644-3295 Re/Max Town Centre 407-367-2000 Winter Park Land Company 407-644-2900 Winter Park Magazine 407-647-0225

Bicycle Parking

Shoes 25 Rieker Shoes 17 Shoooz On Park Avenue

407-539-0425 407-647-0110

Specialty Shops 2 5 14 7 15 13 3 13 20 18 19 6

COLE AVENUE

28

FREE 4 Hr Parking 4th & 5th levels

P

5 23

19

9

CANTON AVENUE

25

300 N

7 16 20 15 17 12

21 24

1

8 3 1 5 4 6 2 9

MAIN STAGE

Post Office

Central Park

407-740-6003 321-274-6618

• = Not on Map

LINCOLN AVENUE

West Meadow

MORSE BOULEVARD

P FREE 4 Hour Parking LOT A

VIRGINIA AVE

5 9

10

100 N

9

11

6 7 12

9

6

8 10 9 17 100 S

3

WELBOURNE AVENUE P 3-hour Public Parking on ground level

Bank of America Parking Garage

200 S 12

NEW ENGLAND AVENUE

14

8 ALFOND INN

1

13

19

WELCOME 18 CENTER

6

3 1

12

3 BOAT TOUR

2 14 4 1 15 13

4 8 2 7

17

10

3

4

13 14 15

11

Rose Garden

HISTORY MUSEUM P 3-hour Parking

LOT B Farmers’ Market

2 1 6

5 Veteran’s Fountain

20

200 N

P

4 Hour Public Parking

Weddings

NEW ENGLAND AVENUE

11

GARFIELD AVE.

10 Luxury Trips 407-622-8747 18 Winter Park Welcome Center 407-644-8281

Hannibal Square

400 N

4

Park 23 Place

18

Travel Services

321-422-0841 407-644-1106 407-629-5531 407-622-0222 407-975-9137 407-645-2278

2

Park Place Garage

Sweets

The Collection Bridal Winter Park Wedding Co

N 500 N

CHARLES HOSMER MORSE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART 1

1 Ben and Jerry’s 407-325-5163 1 Kilwins Chocolates & Ice Cream 407-622-6292 407-644-3200 14 Peterbrooke Chocolatier

1 3

3 5

BRANDYWINE SQUARE

Fig and Julep 321-972-1899 The Ancient Olive 321-972-1899 Brandywine Books 407-644-1711 Christian Science Reading Room 407-647-1559 Frank 407-629-8818 Maureen H. Hall Stationery & Invitations 407-629-6999 New General 321-972-2819 Partridge Tree Gift Shop 407-645-4788 Rifle Paper Co. 407-622-7679 The Spice and Tea Exchange 407-647-7423 Ten Thousand Villages 407-644-8464 Writer’s Block Bookstore 407-592-1498

WELBOURNE AVENUE

PENSYLVANIA AVE

11 5 2 15 16 3

Parking Key

Real Estate Services 7 5 9

407-998-8090 407-647-1072

Interior Design

Winter Park, Florida

Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens 407-647-6294 2 Bach Festival Society of Winter Park 407-646-2182 407-628-8200 2 Casa Feliz 3 Cornell Fine Arts Museum 407-646-2526 1 Morse Museum of American Art 407-645-5311 407-644-4056 3 Scenic Boat Tour • The Winter Park Playhouse 407-645-0145 10 Winter Park History Museum 407-647-2330 5

4

LYMAN AVENUE

300 S

2

15 16 11

7 19

LYMAN AVENUE

1 P 4-hour Parking

3

INTERLACHEN AVENUE

Financial Services

PARK AVENUE

407-621-4200

Museums & Cultural Attractions

KNOWLES AVENUE

Bank of America 407-646-3600 F4 Wealth Advisors 407-960-4769 Florida Community Bank 407-622-5000 The Kozlowski CPA Firm LLC 407-381-4432 Moss, Krusick and Associates 407-644-5811

Law Firms

CENTER STREET

5 21 28 5 8

407-647-7277 407-629-0042 407-636-7366 407-960-3778 407-644-8609 407-790-7997 585-766-9886 407-671-4424 407-599-4111 407-335-4548 407-647-7520 321-972-2819 407-645-3939 407-629-7270 407-335-4914 407-381-4432 407-645-3616 407-262-0050 407-951-8039 407-960-3993 407-696-9463

Small Business Counsel

CASA FELIZ

310 Park South Barnie’s CoffeeKitchen BoiBrazil Churrascaria blu on the avenue Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine Cocina 214 Garp and Fuss Laurel Latin Cuisine Luma on Park Maestro Cucina Napoletana mon petit cheri cafe New General Panera Bread Pannullo’s Italian Restaurant Park Avenue Smoothie Cafe The Parkview Power House Cafe Prato Rome’s Flavours UMI Japanese Restaurant The Wine Room on Park Ave

8

407-644-3829 321-972-3985

PARK AVENUE

1 1 19 2 2 3 3 6 1 5 4 12 4 2 1 6 7 2 4 7 3

Simmons Jewelers Through the Looking Glass

WEST PARK

Dining

4 9

NEW YORK AVENUE

Apparel 14 Arabella 407-636-8343 12 Bebe’s/Liz’s Fashion Experience 407-628-1680 2 Charyli 407-455-1983 321-203-4733 9 Cottonways 6 Current 407-628-1087 1 Evelyn and Arthur 407-740-0030 407-790-4987 13 Forema Boutique 15 The Impeccable Pig 407-636-4043 2 J. McLaughlin 407-960-3965 407-629-7944 7 John Craig Clothier 407-539-2324 6 Lilly Pulitzer 407-628-1222 19 Lucky Brand Jeans 5 Maestro Cucina Napoletana 407-335-4548 4 Max and Marley 407-636-6204 16 Siegel’s Winter Park 407-645-3100 407-647-7241 4 Synergy 321-209-1096 • TADofstyle 12 The Grove 407-740-0022 20 tugboat and the bird 407-647-5437 407-628-1609 17 Tuni

City Hall

6 2 5

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EVENTS ART, HISTORY, ENTERTAINMENT AND MORE

Opera Honors Hometown Hosts

Steve and Kathy Miller opened their Winter Park home to Opera Orlando performances during the organization’s formative years. Kathy is a classically trained vocalist.

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Galas tend to revolve around exotic themes and distant places. Opera Orlando’s third annual gala is no exception to the rule. The difference is, for this year’s black-tie event there’s more than one reason that all the far-away make-believe will make the guests of honor feel right at home.

Una Serenata Italiana! will evoke both Italian opera and the country in which it originated four centuries ago. It will also honor Kathy and Steve Miller, whose generosity included offering their Italian-themed home in Winter Park as a performance space for Opera Orlando in the company’s formative years.

Kathy is a classically trained singer who attended Southern Methodist University; Steve is the retired founder of Sawtek, a Central Florida company that developed and marketed microelectronic communication technology.

South Dakota natives, the Millers moved to Central Florida in 1978 and immediately began to support Orlando Opera, a now defunct organization not to be confused with Opera Orlando. After Orlando Opera closed in 2009, Florida Opera Theatre, the precursor to Opera Orlando, was founded.

The black-tie affair will be held at the Alfond Inn on Friday, April 20 at 6:30 p.m. Individual tickets are priced from $250 to $275. Tables are priced from $3,000 to $8,000. Visit operaorlando.org for more information and to purchase tickets.

“As it should be, the whole evening will be a reflection of Kathy and Steve,” says John Wettach, president of Opera Orlando’s board of directors.

“Even though they’re ubiquitous in their support of Central Florida arts and culture, opera has always been their primary passion.”

Adds Gabriel Priesser, an accomplished baritone and the opera’s executive and artistic director: “There’s hardly an opera performer in Central Florida who hasn’t been impacted by the generosity and support of Kathy and Steve — including myself.”

A quintet of singers will be featured, all of whom are favorites of Kathy Miller, who also serves as the artistic advisory chairperson of the opera’s board.

Among the singers scheduled to attend are Bridgette Gan, a critically acclaimed performer of opera who’s equally well versed in other musical genres.

She sang the role of Norina in Opera Orlando’s

Steve and Kathy Miller’s Lake Maitland home (above left) has been the setting for several full-scale opera productions. The home’s focal point, where the performances were staged, is just inside the entranceway: a two-story grand room encircled by marble columns and a second-floor balcony. Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi was one of several productions hosted by the Millers. The cast included (above right, left to right): Austin Hallock, Jennifer A. Boles, Edward Washington, Jane Christeson, Russell Franks, Samantha Barnes, Daniel Makendy and Jacobs Daniel Johanson.

production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale.

Gan’s husband, baritone Scott Johnson, is also on the bill, along with soprano Julia Foster, a Rollins College voice professor who sang the role of Bethany Squeals in Opera Orlando’s production of Mozart’s The Impresario.

Joining them will be mezzo soprano Robyn Rocklein, who sang the lead role in Bizet’s Carmen for Florida Opera Theatre. Rocklein has previously been featured in Opera Orlando’s recital series.

Rounding out the lineup is tenor Anthony Ciaramitaro, a Rollins graduate who sang the role of Fernando in Florida Opera Theatre’s production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte. He returned to sing in Opera Orlando’s production of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti.

Ciaramitaro has since earned a master’s degree in voice from Florida State University, and was selected to be a part of the prestigious Wolf Trap Opera Studio and San Francisco Opera Merola Program.

Pianist Robin Stamper will provide accompaniment for the singers. The gala — which will also feature a silent auction, impromptu serenades and a video tribute to the Millers — will be hosted by the Orlando Sentinel’s “Taking Names” columnist, Scott Maxwell.

Opera Orlando now presents its mainstage productions at the Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater, part of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts complex in downtown Orlando. It will move to Steinmetz Hall, the arts center’s third venue, when it opens in 2020.

But in its formative years, the company staged operas at the Millers’ home, which sits along the eastern shore of Lake Maitland. It was designed and built by Nasrallah Architectural Group, a company with an impressive track record of creating homes

Last year, Gabe Preisser, a widely traveled baritone whose extensive resumé includes more than 40 operatic and musical theater roles, officially joined forces with Opera Orlando as its general director.

that evoke historic architectural traditions.

The home resembles a classic Venetian palace.

Its focal point is just inside the entranceway: a twostory grand room encircled by marble columns, with a massive crystal chandelier in the center.

A row of narrow, arching, velvet-draped floor-toceiling windows on the far wall offers an unimpeded view of the lake. The other three sides of the great room are open to the second floor, creating the effect of a wrap-around balcony.

The Millers opened their home for several intimate productions, beginning with a benefit performance in 2011 that featured Susan Neves, a powerhouse soprano with Orlando family ties.

Apart from staging performances, the Millers pro-

vided rehearsal space and a place for guest artists to stay — one at a time, Kathy Miller is quick to qualify.

“Two singers in one house don’t get along,” she says.

“Sharing the rehearsal time. And the refrigerator.”

She shrugs off the inconveniences.

“It got a little crazy,” she admits. “But, you know, passion overtakes you. When I go to bed at night, I hear this little voice on my shoulder, this little voice in my soul, telling me: ‘It’s all right. We need to do this.’”

Priesser says the same thing about honoring the Millers. “The Una Serenata Italiana theme affords us the opportunity to pull out all the stops and light up the gala with the glory of the Italian opera. The Millers — and everyone who attends — will love it.”

Gala sponsors include the Bryce L. West Foundation, the Dr. Phillips Charities, Sundance Printing, CNP Graphic Design Agency and Winter Park Magazine.

— Michael McLeod n What:

Una Serenata Italiana!

Friday, April 20, 6:30 p.m. (cocktails); 7:30 p.m. (dinner) n Where: The Alfond Inn n Cost: Individual tickets are priced from $250 to $275. Tables are priced from $3,000 to $8,000 n Notes: Opera Orlando’s third annual gala will feature a quintet of powerhouse singers honoring Kathy and Steve Miller, Winter Park residents who held productions in their Lake Maitland home as the company was establishing itself. n Find Out More: Visit operaorlando.org or call 407-512-1900 n When:

EVENTS VISUAL ARTS

Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens. This lakeside museum, open since 1961, is dedicated to preserving the works of the famed Czech sculptor for whom it was both home and studio for more than a decade. Running through April 15 is Island Objects: Art and Adaptation in Micronesia, which draws upon local anthropologist Barbara Wavell’s private collection of archaeological and historical objects and works of art from the Pacific islands of Micronesia.

Then, from April 22 to 28, is the museum’s popular Winter Park Paint Out, during which a dozen or more professional artists paint outdoors — or en plein air — at locations throughout the city. Their finished works are immediately displayed in the museum’s “wet room,” and are available for purchase. Paint out also includes several special events and workshops.

On May 8, the museum debuts a major exhibit, Arabesque: Contemporary Conversations, in partnership with Islamic Artists of Orlando. Traditional Islamic artwork calls to mind ancient art and architecture highlighting arabesque elements, which are decorations based on geometric patterns of scrolling and interlacing patterns. Arabesque continues through August 19. The Polasek offers tours of Polasek’s home Tuesday through Saturday. It also offers tours of the restored Capen-Showalter House three times weekly: Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:30 a.m., and Saturdays at 10:15 a.m. That historic house, built in 1885, was saved from demolition several years ago and floated across Lake Osceola to its current location on the Polasek’s grounds. Regular admission is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors, $3 for students and free for children.

633 Osceola Avenue, Winter Park. 407-647-6294. polasek.org.

Art & History Museums — Maitland. The Maitland Art Center, one of five museums anchoring the city’s Cultural Corridor, was founded as an art colony in 1937 by visionary American artist and architect J. André Smith. The center, located at 231 West Packwood Avenue, Maitland, is the Orlando area’s only National Historic Landmark and one of the few surviving examples of Mayan Revival architecture in the Southeast. Continuing through April 22 is the exhibit Art31: Fiber, featuring the work of three internationally recognized artists — Alisha McCurdy, Hye Shin and Carrie Sieh — each of whom use materials such as cloth and paper, and techniques such as stitching and quilting. The three women worked at the art center daily throughout March, creating new works to be displayed. Admission to the center is $3 for adults, $2 for seniors and children ages 4 to 18, and free for children age 3 and under. The Cultural Corridor also includes the Maitland Historical Museum and the Telephone Museum, both at 221 West Packwood Avenue, Maitland, and the Waterhouse Residence Museum and Carpentry Shop Museum, both built in the 1880s and located at 820 Lake Lily Drive, Maitland. In April, Springtime at the Waterhouse features the Victorian-era home decked out for Easter.

On April 21 from 6 to 9 p.m., the Maitland museums will celebrate art and history with Participation 2018,

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their annual fundraising dinner, with live entertainment, a silent auction, and opportunities to mingle with local artists including Anthony Deal, Matt Duke, Richard Munster, Suzanne Oberholtzer, Tory Tepp and Hye Shin. Tickets to the reception and dinner are $125 each. 407-539-2181. artandhistory.org.

Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. With more than 19,000 square feet of gallery and public space, the Morse houses the world’s most important collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany creations, including jewelry, pottery, paintings, art glass and an entire chapel interior originally designed and built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Ongoing is 19th-Century American Landscapes, which illustrates the affinity between the French Barbizon School (French painters of nature who were active from 1830-1870) and American painters of the late 1800s whose works are in the museum’s permanent collection, including Otto Heinigke, William Louis Sonntag and George Inness. The exhibit complements Towards Impressionism: Landscape Painting from Corot to Monet, a concurrent exhibit at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College. Meanwhile, the largest known painting by American landscape artist Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) is on display at the Morse through early July courtesy of the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in Vermont, which owns the work.

The Domes of the Yosemite, an 1867 oil painting measuring almost 10 by 15 feet, just underwent refurbishment by conservation experts in Miami and is making its first appearance since 1873 outside St. Johnsbury (not coincidentally, Charles Hosmer Morse’s hometown). And as part of the museum’s 2017 diamond anniversary, the Morse continues to showcase the breadth of its eclectic collection with Celebrating 75 Years — Pathways of American Art at the Morse Museum, which includes portraits, landscape paintings, pottery and works on paper assembled by founders Hugh and Jeannette McKean. That exhibit continues through September 23. Admission to the museum is free through April on Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m.; otherwise, the cost is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors, $1 for students, and free for children younger than age 12.

445 North Park Avenue, Winter Park. 407-645-5311. morsemuseum.org.

Cornell Fine Arts Museum. Located on the campus of Rollins College, the museum houses one of the oldest and most eclectic collections of fine art in Florida. Free tours take place at 1 p.m. on Saturdays at the on-campus facility, and at 1 p.m. on Sundays at the nearby Alfond Inn, which displays dozens of works from the museum’s Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art. Happy Hour tours of the Alfond Collection are also conducted on the first Wednesday of most months at 5:30 p.m. If you prefer historic works, Throwback Thursday tours are offered at the museum from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. on the third Thursday of most months. Continuing through April 8 is the exhibit Towards Impressionism: Landscape Painting from Corot to Monet, which features 45 works from the Musée des Beaux Arts, which owns one of the world’s largest collections of French 19th-century landscape

paintings. (A complementary exhibition, 19th-Century American Landscapes, is simultaneously on display at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art.) The exhibit Picturing War presents an array of objects — drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection — created in response to U.S. involvement in global conflicts since the end of World War I. It runs through May 13. A third exhibit, Ria Brodell: Devotion, features works from two series of paintings by the Boston artist — The Handsome & The Holy and Butch Heroes — both of which showcase real people, including some historical figures, who challenged gender norms. These exhibits also continue through May 13. A new, long-term exhibit whose works periodically change — Ruptures and Remnants: Selections from the Permanent Collection — offers material manifestations, from antiquity to present day, of ruptures both tiny and momentous, from personal crises to nation-state upheavals. It replaces the museum’s longrunning Conversations exhibit, and continues through December 31, 2020. There’s also the 2018 Senior Studio Exhibition (April 14 to May 13), with works by Rollins College graduating seniors, and the 2018 Rollins Faculty Exhibition (also April 14 to May 13), featuring works by the school’s faculty members. Following are two exhibits that open May 25 and continue through August 26: Margaret Bourke-White’s Different World, which examines the trailblazing photographer’s overseas work, including selected images from the museum’s collection of photographs she took in Russia; and My Myopia, a series of decorated windows by artist Trong Gia Nguyen, who went on to earn art degrees at the University of Central Florida and the University of South Florida in the 1990s after his family fled South Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975. Admission to the museum is free, courtesy of PNC Financial Services Group. 1000 Holt Avenue, Winter Park. 407-646-2526. rollins.edu/cfam.

Crealdé School of Art. Established in 1975, this nonprofit arts organization on Winter Park’s east side offers year-round visual-arts classes for all ages, taught by more than 40 working artists. Admission to the school’s galleries is free, though there are fees for art classes. Recent work from Crealdé’s faculty is on display through April 28 in Director’s Choice VII, an exhibit featuring photography, painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, jewelry, glass and fiber arts.

A major educational exhibit, Honoring Two Winter Park Legends: The Paintings of Hugh McKean and Jeannette Genius McKean, continues through May 19 both at the school’s Jenkins Gallery and at the Hannibal Square Heritage Center’s visiting-exhibition gallery on Winter Park’s west side. The exhibit features works on loan from the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, which the McKeans founded. Forty paintings by the couple, both of whom were formally trained artists, will be on display at the two venues. Also, from June 8 through September 1, the 37th Annual Juried Student Exhibition will feature some of the year’s best work by Crealdé students in various media, including paintings, drawings, photographs, ceramics, sculptures, jewelry and

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EVENTS fiber pieces. 600 Saint Andrews Boulevard, Winter Park. 407-671-1886. crealde.org.

Hannibal Square Heritage Center. Established in 2007 by the Crealdé School of Art in partnership with residents of Hannibal Square and the City of Winter Park, the center celebrates the city’s historically African-American west side with archival photographs, original artwork and oral histories from longtime residents that are together known as the Heritage Collection. Through May 19, the center’s visiting-exhibition gallery hosts, along with the Crealdé School of Art on the city’s east side, Honoring Two Winter Park Legends: The Paintings of Hugh McKean and Jeannette Genius McKean. Ongoing at the center is the Hannibal Square Timeline, which documents significant local and national events in African-American history since the Emancipation Proclamation. Admission is free. 642 West New England Avenue, Winter Park.

407-539-2680. hannibalsquareheritagecenter.org.

PERFORMING ARTS

Annie Russell Theatre. The next show at “The Annie,” the historic jewel box of a theater on the campus of Rollins College, is 9 to 5: The Musical, with music and lyrics by Dolly Parton and based on the hit 1980 film starring Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as three oppressed but determined working women.

The show runs April 20 to 28. There are eight performances, with most shows at 8 p.m. plus matinees at 2 or 4 p.m. Tickets are $20. The Second Stage Series, in the nearby Fred Stone Theater, features studentproduced and student-directed plays. Upcoming is On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning, a jaunt through a continuum of space, time, feminism and fashion by three intrepid women from the Victorian era. It runs April 11 to 14 at 8 p.m., with a 2 p.m. matinee April 14. Admission to Second Stage shows is free to the public, with seating on a first-come, firstserved basis. 1000 Holt Ave., Winter Park. 407-6462145. rollins.edu/annie-russell-theatre.

Center for Contemporary Dance. A not-for-profit organization focused on dance education, incubation and production, the center designs its programs and performances to provide students of all ages, from novice to professional, with experience in classical, post-classical and world dance forms. During the past 15 years, the center has supported artists in the creation and presentation of more than 250 new works from its home studio at 3580 Aloma Avenue. This year’s spring production, An Evening of Dance, features students in the organization’s Classical Ballet, Contemporary and Competitive Dance Ensembles, but also includes works by students in tap, jazz and musical-theater classes. Pre-professional students perform solo and small-group works. Tickets for the April 15 production are $12 to $25. The performance, which begins at 7 p.m., is in the auditorium at Trinity Preparatory School, 5700 Trinity Prep Lane. 407-6958366. thecenterfordance.org.

Winter Park Playhouse. Winter Park’s only professional, nonprofit theater continues its 2017-18 mainstage season April 5 to 21 with Nunsense A-Men!,

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an off-Broadway musical comedy in which all of the characters are portrayed by men. The premise: When the Little Sisters of Hoboken discover that their cook, Sister Julia, Child of God, has accidentally poisoned 52 of the nuns, they organize a variety show to raise money for the burials. The next production, The Honky Tonk Angels, is a whimsical musical comedy (by the creator of Always ... Patsy Cline) about three women determined to follow their musical dreams to Nashville. The score features more than 30 classic country tunes. Performances are May 11 to 20 and May 31 to June 10. Both musicals run Thursdays through Sundays at 7:30 p.m., with matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets range in price from $15 for students to $42 for evening performances. 711 Orange Avenue, Winter Park.

407-645-0145. winterparkplayhouse.org.

FESTIVALS

Florida Film Festival. Now in its 27th year, this Oscarqualifying festival premieres some of the best in current, independent and international films. It’s an international affair, drawing about 180 independent feature films, documentaries, shorts and animated movies from across the U.S. and worldwide. This year, the 10day extravaganza — which includes a host of film seminars, parties, celebrity appearances and other events — will take place April 6 to 15, mostly on the grounds of the Enzian, a single-screen art-movie house nestled in a three-acre, oak-shaded Maitland enclave with an outdoor restaurant and bar. (Some of the films will be shown at the Regal Cinemas megaplex in Winter Park Village.) Enzian, a nonprofit that hosts several other, smaller film festivals as well as numerous educational and social-service events, is in the midst of a fundraising campaign to add a pair of smaller theaters to the complex and broaden its programming in coming years. Both single tickets and packages for this year’s festival events are available. 1300 South Orlando Avenue, Maitland. 407-629-1088. floridafilmfestival.com.

Hannibal Square Heritage Center Folk & Urban Art Festival. This annual festival, now in its ninth year, celebrates culture and diversity through art and music. More than 25 Florida artists will offer their works for sale from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on April 21; participants include members of the original Florida Highwaymen, a loosely organized but now famous group of African-American landscape artists. The event includes live music, arts-and-crafts demonstrations, a soul-food truck, and both a Puerto Rican Vejigante mask-making workshop and a “Kid-folk” workshop that culminate with a public parade. Admission is free. 642 West New England Avenue. hannibalsquareheritagecenter.org.

FILM

Enzian. This cozy, nonprofit alternative cinema offers a plethora of film series. Tickets are usually $11 for regular admission; $9 for matinees, students, seniors and military (with ID); and $8.50 for Enzian Film Society members. But children under age 12 are admitted free to Peanut Butter Matinee Family Films, shown the fourth Sunday of each month at noon. Upcoming shows include Short Circuit (April 29), Coraline (May

27) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (June 24). Saturday Matinee Classics are shown the second Saturday of each month at 11 a.m. Upcoming shows include The Right Stuff (May 12) and Ran (June 9). Cult Classics are shown the second and last Tuesday of each month at 9:30 p.m. Upcoming shows include Pretty in Pink (April 24). FilmSlam, which spotlights Florida-made short films, takes place most months on the first or second Sunday at 1 p.m.; the next scheduled dates are May 6 and June 10. Music Mondays present new and classic concert-music documentaries and music-focused films, usually on the third Monday of the month at 9:30 p.m. Midnight Movies are an occasional series of envelope-pushing classic and cutting-edge films that start at 11:59 p.m. Other special showings include: The Muppets (Easter Brunch and Egg Hunt, April 1, 10:30 a.m.), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (National Theatre Live, April 28, 11 a.m.), Oklahoma! (Mother’s Day, May 13, 11 a.m.), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Father’s Day, June 17, 11:30 a.m.), and Julius Caesar (National Theatre Live, June 23, 11 a.m.). 1300 South Orlando Avenue, Maitland. 407-629-0054 (information line), 407-6291088 (theater offices). enzian.org.

Popcorn Flicks in the Park. The City of Winter Park and Enzian collaborate to offer classic, family-friendly films free in Central Park on Park Avenue. These outdoor screenings are usually on the second Thursday of each month, and start whenever it gets dark — figure 8 p.m. this time of year. Upcoming films include Willow (April 5), Planet of the Apes (May 10) and Enchanted (June 14). Bring a snack plus a blanket or chairs. 407-629-1088. enzian.org.

Screen on the Green. The City of Maitland offers a free outdoor film most months on the field at Maitland Middle School. Bring a blanket or chairs.

The next films include Sing (April 7, 7:30 p.m.) and Moana (May 12, 8:15 p.m.); check the city website’s special events calendar for future dates, times and titles. 1901 Choctaw Trail, Maitland. 407-539-0042. itsmymaitland.com.

Friday Brown Bag Matinees. The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art presents three film series each year on topics related to the museum’s collection as well as art in general. Admission is free to these lunchtime screenings, which span the noon hour on select Fridays in the Jeannette G. and Hugh F. McKean Pavilion, just behind the museum on Canton Avenue. Bring a lunch; the museum provides soft drinks and themed refreshments. The Spring Series explores American art from some of the earliest European pioneers in the 16th century to modern-day art and architecture through the three-part BBC documentary Art of America and the PBS documentary The Hudson River School: Artistic Pioneers. The series starts April 13 with Art of America: Looking for Paradise and continues with The Hudson River School (April 20), Art of America: Modern Dreams (April 27) and Art of America: What Lies Beneath (May 4). 161 West Canton Avenue. 407-645-5311. morsemuseum.org.

HISTORY

Casa Feliz Historic Home Museum. This stunningly

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EVENTS restored Spanish farmhouse-style home, designed by acclaimed architect James Gamble Rogers II, is now a community center and museum. Free open houses are hosted by trained docents on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to noon. Also, live music is featured in the large downstairs parlor on Sundays from noon to 3 p.m. (see “Music”). 656 North Park Avenue (adjacent to the Winter Park Golf Course), Winter Park. 407-628-8200. casafeliz.us.

Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida. The center is dedicated to combating anti-Semitism, racism and prejudice, with the goal of developing a moral and just community through educational and cultural programs. It houses permanent and temporary exhibitions, archives and a research library. Continuing through April 27 is the exhibit Parallel Journeys, which tells the stories of six teenagers who were victims, witnesses or perpetrators of the Holocaust or other Nazi oppression during World War II. The museum’s ongoing exhibit, Tribute to the Holocaust, is a presentation of artifacts, videos, text, photographs and other artwork. Admission is free.

851 North Maitland Avenue, Maitland. 407-6280555. holocaustedu.org.

Winter Park History Museum. Ongoing displays include artifacts dating from the city’s beginnings as a New England-style resort in the 1880s. Its current exhibit, Winter Park: The War Years, 1941-1945 — Home Front Life in an American Small Town, explores the ways in which World War II affected Winter Parkers.

Its upcoming exhibition, Wish You Were Here: The Hotels & Motels of Winter Park, opens June 7. Admission is free. 200 West New England Avenue, Winter Park. 407-644-2330. wphistory.org.

Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts. Eatonville is strongly associated with Harlem Renaissance writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who lived there as a girl and recorded her childhood memories in her classic autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. The museum that bears her name provides information about the historic city; it also sponsors exhibits featuring the works of African-American artists and is an integral part of the annual, weeklong Zora!

Festival each January. Continuing through September is the exhibit The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community: The Early Years, 1987-1997. The multimedia presentation is based upon material from the organization’s archives. Admission to the museum at other times is also free, though group tours require a reservation and are charged a fee. 227 East Kennedy Boulevard, Eatonville. 407-647-3188. zorafestival.org, hurstonmuseum.org.

HOLIDAYS

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64th Annual Winter Park Easter Egg Hunt. A Winter Park tradition dating back to President Eisenhower’s first term in office, the hunt is held the day before Easter — this year, that’s Saturday, March 31. More than 10,000 eggs are hidden in Central Park’s West Meadow, and several hundred children usually show up to try and find them. (Children are asked to bring a basket with them.) The fun begins at 10 a.m.,

with kids age 10 and under allowed to begin lining up at 9:30 a.m. Children with special needs are encouraged to participate. Extra treats will be on hand afterward for those left eggless. Corner of New York Avenue and Morse Boulevard. 407-599-3463. cityofwinterpark.org.

Earth Day in the Park. This free, fun-filled event by the main stage in Central Park features a kids’ zone with games, tie-dye T-shirts, do-it-yourself art with help from the Crealdé School of Art, a “quick draw” art competition organized by the Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens, live music all day, child and adult yoga (bring a mat), composting and recycling education, and a bike-valet service along with food-and-beverage vendors. The April 15 event (one week before the worldwide Earth Day) starts at 11 a.m. — though the “quick draw” competition begins with registration at 9 a.m. for a 10 a.m. start — and winds down at 3 p.m. In celebration of Arbor Day (April 27), certified arborists from Winter Park’s Urban Forestry Division will give away an assortment of young trees in one-gallon containers for city residents to plant at home. Park Avenue at Garfield Avenue.

407-599-3364. cityofwinterpark.org/earthday.

Memorial Day Service. The ceremony in Winter Park’s Glen Haven Memorial Park cemetery usually includes an honor guard, music and a guest speaker.

May 28 at 11 a.m. Admission is free. 2300 Temple Drive. 407-647-1100.

THE DOMES of the Yosemite Through July 8, 2018 Newly conserved in Florida, Albert Bierstadt’s monumental 1867 masterpiece of the Yosemite Valley is on view at the Morse through a special loan from the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in Vermont.

www.morsemuseum.org follow us on

445 north park avenue winter park, florida 32789 (407) 645-5311 just a 5-minute walk from the sunrail station.

Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Pointing in Pink), 2017, Collage, The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Image courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

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EVENTS LECTURES

Winter Park Institute at Rollins College. Each year, the institute presents lectures, readings and seminars by thought leaders in an array of disciplines. The sixth and final lecture of the 2017-18 season, on April 4, is Writings on the Wall: An Evening with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the legendary National Basketball League star, social and cultural activist, and New York Times best-selling author. His lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. in Warden Arena at the Alfond Sports Center on the Rollins College campus. Ticket prices range from $15 to $50. 1000 Holt Avenue, Winter Park. 407-646-2145. rollins.edu/wpitickets.

MARKETS

Maitland Farmers’ Market. This year-round, open-air market — held each Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. — features fresh produce, seafood, breads and cheeses as well as plants, all-natural skin-care products and live music by Performing Arts of Maitland. The setting on Lake Lily boasts a boardwalk, jogging trails, a playground and picnic areas. 701 Lake Lily Drive, Maitland. itsmymaitland.com.

Winter Park Farmers’ Market. The region’s busiest and arguably most popular farmers’ market is held every Saturday from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the old railroad depot, which also houses the Winter Park History Museum. The open-air market offers baked goods, produce, plants, honey, cheese, meat, flowers, crafts and

other specialty items. After shopping, make a morning of it with a stroll along nearby Park Avenue. Dogs are welcome to bring their people. 200 West New England Avenue, Winter Park. cityofwinterpark.org.

MUSIC

Bach Festival Society of Winter Park. The society’s 2017-18 season starts winding down April 5 with the final installment of its Insights & Sounds series, which spotlights the genius of J.S. Bach through several of his compositions, including a Brandenburg concerto and his only surviving solo cantata for tenor. The 7 p.m. concert in Tiedtke Concert Hall, on the Rollins College campus, features tenor John Grau. The season closes April 21 and 22 with the final installment of the society’s Choral Masterworks series, African-American Masterpieces: Symphonic Spirituals. The program, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., presents provocative and passionate works by three of the 20th century’s most important African-American composers: William L. Dawson’s Negro Symphony, William Grant Still’s And They Lynched Him on a Tree and R. Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses. Performances are 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday in Knowles Memorial Chapel, also on the Rollins campus. Tickets range in price from $25 to $65. 1000 Holt Avenue. 407-6462182. bachfestivalflorida.org.

Blue Bamboo Center for the Arts. This eclectic venue

is part concert hall, part recording studio and part art gallery. It offers live performances most evenings, with an emphasis on jazz, classical and world music — although theater, dance and spoken-word presentations are also on the schedule. Upcoming musical dates include vocalist Edie Carey (April 14, 8 p.m.), the Seminole Community College Big Band Reunion under the direction of Dr. William J. Hinkle (May 19, 8 p.m.), and current Grass Roots lead singer/bassist Mark Dawson (June 17, 6 p.m.). 1905 Kentucky Avenue, Winter Park.

407-636-9951. bluebambooartcenter.com.

Central Florida Folk. This Winter Park-based nonprofit is dedicated to promoting and preserving live folk music, primarily through concerts on the last Sunday of each month (except May, when the Florida Folk Festival takes center stage). The group’s primary venue is the Winter Park Public Library, 460 East New England Avenue, Winter Park. The next three library concerts are: Curtis and Loretta, plus Steve Erickson (April 29); Bing Futch, plus Lauren Heintz (May 20); and Del Suggs, plus Lee Hunter (June 24). Shows start at 2 p.m. A donation of $15 for nonmembers is suggested. 407-679-6426. cffolk.org.

Dexter’s of Winter Park. This well-known restaurant in Winter Park’s Hannibal Square neighborhood occasionally has live musical acts, with no cover charge.

Upcoming events include party band Speakeasy (April 6, 8:45 to 11:45 p.m.). 558 West New England Avenue, Winter Park. 407-629-1150. dextersorlando.com.

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EVENTS Get Your Jazz On. The Alfond Inn continues its concert series on April 27, with live jazz under the stars that includes not only music but roasted pig, a vegetarian alternative, wine, beer, cocktails and cigars. The outdoor event (which moves indoors if it rains) runs from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $50 in advance, valet parking included. Alfond Inn, 300 East New England Avenue. 407-998-8090. thealfondinn.com.

Music at the Casa. The Casa Feliz Historic Home Museum regularly presents free acoustic-instrument performances on Sunday afternoons from noon to 3 p.m. in the home’s cozy main parlor. Upcoming performances include: violinist Lisa Ferrigno & Friends (April 8), harpist Catherine Way (April 15), singerguitarist Rev. Shawn Garvey (April 22), classical guitarist Brian Hayes (April 29), Shannon Caine with a Beautiful Music quartet (May 6), Classern Quartet (May 20), flamenco guitarist Omar Blanco (May 27), classical guitarists Troy Gifford and Chris Belt (June 3), and Alborea Dances Flamenco (June 10). 656 North Park Avenue (adjacent to the Winter Park Golf Course), Winter Park. 407-628-8200. casafeliz.us.

EVENTS

17th Annual Dinner on the Avenue. The city supplies the tables, chairs, white linen tablecloths and, of course, the outdoor setting while you and your friends, family or co-workers supply fellowship and clever conversation while dining in the middle of closed-off Park Avenue opposite Central Park.

The annual event is also a friendly competition, with awards for table decorations in such categories as “Most Colorful,” “Most Elegant” and “Most Original.” This year’s April 14 event, already sold out at $125 a table, is from 6 to 10 p.m. 407-599-3334. cityofwinterpark.org.

33rd Annual Taste of Winter Park. Sample all the best food that Winter Park has to offer on April 18 from 5 to 8 p.m. More than 40 of Central Florida’s top chefs, caterers, bakers, brewers, vintners and confectioners bring their best noshes and beverages to “Winter Park’s ultimate foodie festival.” Tickets range in price from $35 to $50. Winter Park Farmers’ Market, 200 West New England Avenue. 407-6448281. winterpark.org.

Florida Writers Association. The Orlando/Winter Park-Area Chapter meets the first Wednesday of each month from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. for guest speakers and discussions organized by author and “book coach” Rik Feeney. Upcoming discussions include: Systematic Book Editing with book editor Kristen Stieffel (April 4), Marketing Extravaganza with Florida Writers Association Marketing Vice President Shannon Bell (May 2), and The Writer as Presenter with speaker and author Mary Flynn (June 6). University Club of Winter Park, 841 North Park Avenue, Winter Park. 407-529-8539. fwaorlando.wordpress.com.

Maitland Public Library 5K. This annual 3.1-mile run is mainly a community-building effort. This year’s foot race is on May 19 at 7:30 a.m., starting and ending in Quinn Strong Park, 347 South Maitland Avenue,

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Maitland. 407-647-7700. maitlandpubliclibrary.org.

Nerd Nite Orlando. This monthly gathering is based on a simple premise: Learning is more fun when you’re drinking with friends and colleagues.

Introduced to the Orlando area in 2013, Nerd Nites operate in more than 100 cities worldwide, offering participants an evening of entertaining yet thoughtprovoking presentations in a casual setting. The local version takes place on the second Thursday of each month at 7 p.m. Upcoming dates include April 12, May 10 and June 14. The Geek Easy, 114 South Semoran Boulevard, No. 6, Winter Park. 407- 3329636. orlando.nerdnite.com.

Playwrights Round Table. This play-reading workshop, usually held on the second Sunday of each month on the campus of Rollins College, invites area writers to bring any piece they’re working on for review and discussion. Upcoming dates include April 15 (the third Sunday) and May 13, both from 7 to 9 p.m. Those planning to read their work aloud should email info@theprt.com to schedule a time slot. It’s free, though memberships with added benefits are available. Fred Stone Theater, 1000 Holt Avenue, Winter Park. 407-761-2683. theprt.com.

Wednesday Open Words. One of the area’s longest-running open-mic poetry nights takes place every Wednesday at 9 p.m. at Austin’s Coffee, 929 West Fairbanks Avenue, Winter Park. The free readings are hosted by Curtis Meyer. 407-975-3364. austinscoffee.com Work in Progress: A Group for Writers. This monthly discussion group is for writers in any genre, who offer and receive feedback from their writing peers. Guest speakers are often invited. Upcoming dates include April 7 and June 2, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Those planning to read their work should register with organizer and host Gerald Schiffhorst, a University of Central Florida professor emeritus of English, by emailing schiffhorst@ yahoo.com. Conference Room, Winter Park Public Library, 460 East New England Avenue, Winter Park. wppl.org.

Writers of Central Florida or Thereabouts. This group offers various free open-mic programs that attract writers of all stripes. Short Attention Span Storytelling Hour ... or Thereabouts, a literary open-mic night, usually meets the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month at 7 p.m. It’s for authors, poets, filmmakers, comedians, musicians, bloggers and others. Upcoming meetups include April 11, April 25, May 9, May 23, June 13 and June 27. A new series sponsored by the group, Touch the Heart, aims for works that reach audiences and readers emotionally. Upcoming meetups include April 18, May 16 and June 20. Stardust Video & Coffee, 1842 Winter Park Road, Winter Park. meetup.com/writers-of-central-florida-or-thereabouts, stardustvideoandcoffee.wordpress.com.

BUSINESS

Good Morning Winter Park. Hosted by the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce, these monthly gatherings attract business- and civic-minded locals who

enjoy coffee and conversation about community issues. Typically scheduled for the second Friday of each month, upcoming dates include April 13, May 11 and June 8. Networking begins at 8 a.m., followed by a 45-minute program at 8:30 a.m. Admission, which includes a complimentary continental breakfast, is free. Winter Park Welcome Center, 151 West Lyman Avenue, Winter Park. 407-644-8281. winterpark.org.

The Hot Seat. Hosted by the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce, this quarterly business-oriented series puts local executives in the spotlight as they offer advice and discuss entrepreneurism, leadership and sales-and-marketing techniques. The next scheduled gathering is May 23 from noon to 1:15 p.m.; check the chamber website for the featured speaker. Tickets are $10 for members, $15 for nonmembers. Reservations are required. Winter Park Welcome Center, 151 West Lyman Avenue, Winter Park. 407-644-8281. winterpark.org.

Winter Park Executive Women. Hosted by the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce, these gatherings — held the first Monday of most months from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. — feature guest speakers and provide networking opportunities for women business owners. Topics revolve around leadership development, business growth and local initiatives of special interest to women. Scheduled dates include: April 2, when Dr. Linda E. Jaffe of Orlando Health’s Heart Institute Cardiology Group will discuss heart health; May 7, when speaker and author Claudia Jean of Claudia Jean Consulting will present “Let’s Chat: Taking Communication to the Next Level!” and June 4 (check the chamber website for speaker). Tickets, which include lunch, are $25 for members, $50 for nonmembers. Reservations are required. Winter Park Welcome Center, 151 West Lyman Avenue, Winter Park. 407-644-8281. winterpark.org.

CAUSES

Relay for Life. This signature fundraiser for the American Cancer Society takes place each year in more than 5,200 communities and 20 countries.

Participants form teams whose members take turns walking around a track or designated path. A relay can last anywhere from six to 24 hours, and each team is asked to have a member on the track at all times to signify that cancer never sleeps. The local event, the Relay for Life of Orlando North, is April 14 starting at 10 a.m. at Lake Lily Park, Maitland. 407-581-2501. relay.acsevents.org.

Lake Virginia Watershed Cleanup. The city’s Keep Winter Park Beautiful program is seeking volunteers to help clean up Lake Virginia, starting just a minute’s walk from Aloma Avenue at the east end of the Rollins College campus. The April 7 project, which runs from 8 to 11 a.m., involves picking up litter in and around the lake. Kayakers and paddle-boarders are welcome. Volunteers are asked to meet at Dinky Dock Park (410 Ollie Avenue); there they will be provided with breakfast, a T-shirt, snacks and water.

The city will also supply litter grabbers, safety vests, gloves and garbage bags. Participants are urged to

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Art of the Vine. Those with a sense of style and culture will want to eat, drink and be colorful at the 17th annual Art of the Vine, which pairs amazing food and fine wine with great original art and radiant colors. The April 20 event, which starts at 6 p.m., benefits New Hope for Kids, which helps Central Florida children coping with life-threatening illnesses or grieving the death of loved ones. Tickets are $85 in advance, $100 at the door. Fields BMW, 963 Wymore Road, Maitland. 407-331-3059, Ext. 12. newhopeforkids.org.

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(Tickets for seniors are $7 at the door.) Children under 3 are admitted free. Tickets are on sale at all three Ronald McDonald houses in Orlando. 1050 West Morse Boulevard. 407-206-0957, Ext. 110. ronaldmcdonaldhouseorlando.org.

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ARTSBEAT | BY MICHAEL MCLEOD

THE CONVERGENCE OF ART AND STORY

M

y girlfriend — OK, she’s not really my girlfriend. She’s my consort. That’s the term we chose for each other as being suitably upscale, vaguely romantic, and — let’s face it — more age-appropriate.

Anyway, my consort is fluent about the visual arts. When we’re at galleries and exhibits, she speaks eloquently of brushstrokes and color schemes. I respond with submissive posturing and soft-pallet vocalizations akin to footage you might encounter in a Jane Goodall documentary.

I like art. I just don’t know how to talk about it. If I sit down at my desk and mull for a bit, I can come up with something. Otherwise all I’ve got is a drop-down menu with a choice of three boxes: nice, meh and um.

I’m in my element, on the other hand, when I encounter an interesting backstory, such as the inspiration for the artwork or the evolution of the artist.

Take the recent installation of web-like tendrils encased in translucent, multicolored forms, which hovers overhead in the glass-domed atrium of Winter Park’s Alfond Inn, owned by Rollins College. It’s called Cloud Cities – Nebulous Thresholds.

Nice.

Better still, the piece has a tale to tell.

Its Argentinian-born, German-based creator, Tomás Saraceno, is a blue-sky thinker, literally and figuratively. He’s obsessed with spider webs, astrophysics and ecology — suggesting a link among them in his art.

Elsewhere, he has devised filmy, gravity-defying sculptures, suspended by infrared radiation and the heat of the sun — creations that bespeak his dream that someday, people will live harmoni-

ously in international communities floating high above the earth.

It’s a testament to the turmoil of our times that much of contemporary art is preoccupied, as Saraceno’s is, with social, environmental and humanitarian causes.

That trend is reflected, for example, by the artist whose work graces the cover of this magazine.

Likewise, it’s reflected throughout the Alfond’s hotel-wide collection, which is culled from the college’s Cornell Fine Arts Museum and its Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art. You’ll see that same socially conscious sensibility in exhibits that have sprung up with increasing regularity at most Central Florida art museums and galleries over the past several years.

Julie Heffernan’s cautionary dreamscapes, on display at the Mennello Museum of American Art through June 10, are among the most arresting.

Heffernan, who grew up in California and now lives in New York City, visually imagines a future in which people struggle to escape a detritusstrewn flood by inhabiting luminously rendered trees — the final refuge of a natural world too long abused.

In some ways, Heffernan is a throwback: Her cautionary and overtly symbolic tableaus are often compared to the creations of Hieronymous Bosch, the 16th century fire-and-brimstone Dutch moralist whose paintings spill over with half-naked figures in the midst of either having way too much fun or being posthumously punished for it.

Heffernan calls her works “self-portraits,” painting herself into the middle of the post-apocalyptic scrum, crediting “all of the stuff that hit my eyeballs” over the course of her life as inspiration.

That includes the vividly painted holy cards of

Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud Cities — Nebulous Thresholds (above left) and Julie Heffernan’s Camp Bedlam (above right) are ideal examples of art that has a backstory.

104 W I N T E R P A R K M AG AZI N E | SP RI N G 2018

martyred saints she remembers from her Catholic grade school days — she remembers staring at them and imagining them coming to life — as well as a spooky, rambling, unfinished Victorian mansion that left indelible ripples on her imagination.

As a kid growing up in Marin County, Heffernan’s parents would take her and her siblings to a tourist attraction called Winchester Mystery House in San Jose.

“It was built by the widow of the man who invented the Winchester rifle,” she told me. “When he died, a medium advised her to build a home and never stop building it — otherwise the ghosts of all the people who were killed by her husband’s invention would haunt her. So she did. She never finished. There are stairways and passages that lead to nowhere.”

Many years later, while studying art on a Fulbright scholarship, Heffernan found herself in a haunted maze of another sort: Berlin in the 1980s.

The wall between the east and west sectors still stood. Spies and former Nazis were everywhere.

When the landlord of the cold-water hinterhof flat she shared with her boyfriend found out he was Jewish, he came close to evicting them.

“West Berlin was an amazing place then,” she said. “It wore its subconscious on its sleeve. There were bomb craters and shrapnel everywhere, and memorial cobblestones in front of the houses of Jews who had been taken away to the concentration camps.”

It was in Berlin where Heffernan developed the labyrinthian oeuvre that she now uses to address climate change. Like Saraceno’s, her creations suggest we can rise above it all — both artists having invented visual cues that can be deciphered and understood, assuming we take the time.

You can see what I mean about backstories.

Michael McLeod is a contributing writer for Winter Park Magazine and an adjunct instructor in the English department at Rollins College.

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