Winter Park

>>This program is brought to you in part by the Paul B.

Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation, a proud partner of WUCF, and the Central Florida Community.

>>Coming up on this edition of Florida Road Trip... >>I think everybody that comes here can find a little bit of something that will be interesting for them.

>>We visit a central Florida community that's only ten square miles and packed with Florida history.

It's home to the state's first institution of higher learning and the most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany Art.

>>We actually have some of the best arts and culture in Florida, but I'd argue actually in the United States.

>>Buckle up.

Florida Road Trip is back on the road.

♪♪ Hello and thanks for joining us for Florida Road Trip, I'm Scott Fais.

Chances are if you've ever visited Winter Park, you've likely strolled Park Avenue, home to its many restaurants and shops.

Just across the street is Central Park, a space that played a role in how the city got its name.

You see, when Northerners would come down to escape the winter months, they would enjoy time around a park, much like the one they might have had back home.

>>Our history as Winter Park gets started in really 1885 when Loring A.

Chase actually arrived.

He was businessman.

And like many Chicagoans during that period, he started suffering chronic bronchitis and chronic breathing problems.

The fashionable cure of the day was to send everybody to Florida.

They thought that the warmth and the heat was what was actually curative, when in reality just not being surrounded by, you know, 1800s smog is probably what helped that more than anything else.

>>He started to have a vision of what this town could be.

And he had a friend of his from childhood named Oliver Chapman.

He started telling him about this beautiful area that he found and how cool it would be to create this winter area for wealthy northerners to come down.

Like many areas in Florida, we changed our name a few times along the way, and our original name was Lakeview, and that was given by a homesteader named David Mizell in 1858.

And then we changed the name to Osceola in 1870.

And that was in honor of Chief Osceola.

>>It was actually renamed by Loring A.

Chase and Oliver Chapman to be Winter Park for actually the Central Park that they were trying to create.

And the fact that they wanted people to come here during the winters.

What's very interesting and pretty actually historically unique about Winter Park is that it is a reconstruction town that was designed to actually have African-American property ownership built into the design.

>>What they did was they created an area on the west side of town, and they named it Hannibal Square.

This created their walk to work force.

And the gentleman, they would work in the orange groves or the packing plants.

They would help clear land, they would build homes, they would build buildings on Park Avenue, and they would work in the hotels.

>>The original vote to incorporate the town in 1887 failed.

>>When it came time to incorporate, the grand majority of voters here in Winter Park were African-American.

And as you can imagine, even during Reconstruction U.S. history, there were people in Winter Park that did not want African-Americans to be able to vote.

So they did intimidate the the African-American West Siders to not come across the railroad tracks because they were holding the vote at night.

>>White residents living in the area did not want Hannibal Square included in the town limit.

They felt that they did not want black people making any laws or rules that white people had to be regulated by.

But because of that conflict and when the July vote came up and the people showed up on the Park Avenue to vote, they didn't have a quorum.

That's when Gus Henderson came in.

He went around to the businesses, the churches and the homes and told the people, you know, you need to get out and go and vote to incorporate.

On October the 12th, Gus led the residents of Hannibal Square across the railroad track to the corner of Park and Morse.

>>This vote to incorporate passed.

>>So without West Side Winter Park, Winter Park wouldn't exist at all.

♪♪ >>The western side of Winter Park, known as Hannibal Square, played a pivotal role in Winter Park becoming a town.

And once again, it was Hannibal Square that played a role in Winter Park, becoming a city.

When Winter Park incorporated as a town, aldermen were elected to represent the people.

Two black men from Hannibal Square were elected: Walter Benjamin Simpson and Frank R. Israel.

>>Every time they came up for election, they were reelected.

The whites went to the Florida legislature and asked them to remove Hannibal Square from the town limits and order a new election.

In May of 1893, the legislature and the governor sent down that order removing Hannibal Square from the town limits and ordering a new election.

>>Fast forward several decades later.

Hannibal Square's separation from the town of Winter Park came back into focus as the town's new leadership wanted to incorporate as a city.

But there was a problem.

>>They did not have the population numbers to justify incorporating as the city in 1925 unless they actually reincorporated Hannibal Square back into Winter Park, which brought it back to its original borders.

So that is actually how Winter Park became a city, is it had to learn its lesson twice.

>>And ever since, Hannibal Square has remained parts of Winter Park.

>>I think the most unique thing about Hannibal Square is this Heritage Center.

>>The Hannibal Square Heritage Center offers visitors an opportunity to walk through history and read the stories of the community from those with first person knowledge.

Organizers started collecting photos in 2001 and now have more than 200 in the collection.

>>If you look at one of the photographs, you'll see in the lower right hand corner there's a photograph of a person.

And then in the main part, you see a picture about someone or somebody or someplace in the community.

So it's not my story.

It's the story of the person who brought that photograph to us.

And we won't put up a picture if you don't know who it is.

I really wish people would come out to these events, to the Folk Art Festival, to the MLK celebration, to the Juneteenth, to come to the Heritage Center, learn about the people who used to live where you're living.

♪♪ >>Woven into the early history of Winter Park is Florida's first college: Rollins.

Initially, there were discussions of locating campus in the Daytona Beach area and further north in Jacksonville.

Yet the college planted roots right here and the up and coming community of Winter Park.

>>One of the things that I think is just very endearing is that Rollins started just three years after Winter Park was started and when the opportunity came about for Florida to have its first college, the people in Winter Park jumped on the opportunity.

>>The Congregational Church of the Central Florida area had this idea, or specifically Lucy Cross, who was an active member of the church and a teacher in Daytona area.

She thought Florida residents deserved a higher education that resembled her New England education, and the Winter Park community decided that Reverend Hooker, who was new, would be the one to lead this charge.

Then there was a competition suddenly, and there was a decision about where Congregationalist Church College would go in Florida.

I happened to have Rollins in Winter Park because they raised the most money by a landslide.

Over $110,000 back in 1885.

Alonzo Rollins is the reason why we were able to have the highest bid.

He contributed over $50,000 in property, mostly orange groves in the central Florida area.

Because he gave the most was promised the name of the school.

>>They were in it because they really believed in creating this community.

And in times where Rollins suffered and they almost closed their doors, the same group of people came together and they invested in it so that it would continue.

And without that support in those early years especially, it'd be a very different story today.

>>You might recognize the names of students who attended Rollins, like actor Buddy Ebsen, who appeared in TV's The Beverly Hillbillies and The Wizard of Oz.

Anthony Perkins, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

Dana Ivey, a five time Tony Award nominee for her work on Broadway.

Yet one of the most notable is Fred Rogers.

>>He was a transfer student and he came for the music program.

As many students who had music careers after Rollins did.

And he met his wife here at Rollins.

>>Everyone knows Mister Rogers is a wonderful person, but what you saw is the Fred that we knew, too.

He was maybe the best listener I've ever been around.

When you were talking, and sometimes you almost felt awkward because he was so centered into what you were going to say and he was a listener.

And then he would respond.

And he also had this ability to grab a variety of input and then come out with the most brilliant, brilliant concept.

Just I can't say enough.

I miss him.

I miss him so much.

>>It's really nice to think about Rollins influencing Fred's career because he had such an impact on children and the nation.

He talks about a sign he saw on campus.

We still have it as part of our Mister Rogers Walking tour, and it says life is for service.

And I think this is kind of what we hope students can embody when they're student learners here, that they're contributing to something greater.

>>In honor of Fred Rogers, the college installed this statue on campus in 2021.

It might have been a rainy day, but still a beautiful day in this neighborhood.

♪♪ From museums to festivals to performances, Winter Park is a community that is in love with its art scene.

Although the city is smaller in size, it has a big history of embracing culture.

>>Winter Park is only ten square miles, and within the ten square miles we have over 20 arts and culture organizations just in our city limits.

There is something for everyone here in Winter Park, whether it's visual arts, performing arts, fine arts, or even public art.

We have world class museums throughout the city and we also have educational opportunities in case you want to learn a new talent.

>>One of those museums is the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art.

Before its location here along Park Avenue, the museum first opened in 1942 on Rollins campus, where it was known as the Morse Gallery of Art.

>>One of the things that I love about the museum and its history is the story of Hugh McKean.

>>Hugh McKean was a former president of Rollins College and the husband to Jeannette Genius McKean whose grandfather was Charles Hosmer Morse.

>>But he had this connection to Tiffany and Laurelton Hall because when he was a young artist, he went there to study.

And so he had spent time with Louis Tiffany and was so impressed by Laurelton Hall that when he got word that it had burned down in the late 1950s, he and his wife went there and saved every part of it.

>>Laurelton Hall was the dream home of Tiffany that he built for himself in New York.

Today, the Morse Museum has one of its wings named Laurelton Hall as well.

>>These are the most personal things that belonged to Tiffany and some of his greatest creations.

>>You'll find more than the typical Tiffany lamps here.

>>There are things like fireplace hoods that are made of iron.

And when you look at them, they're a very unique part of what he created.

>>Also unique, this Tiffany Chapel that the museum debuted in 1999.

But it has quite the history.

The chapel was created in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition, and it proved so popular that Tiffany brought it back to New York and put it on display.

Its popularity grew again and it was purchased and donated to the cathedral Saint John, the Divine.

Eventually, the structure was abandoned and Tiffany brought the chapel back to his home.

It stayed there until the McKeans went and rescued it.

Everything that you see here could have been lost.

And really, it's it's a miracle that it didn't.

>>There's more than Tiffany on display here.

Other objects include glass, pottery, furniture and paintings.

Generally, what we are is a period museum.

And so our works really date between the years of 1860 until about 1930.

We have probably about 13,000 objects.

>>Yeah, 13,000 is a lot.

Yet you don't need to clear your calendar for the entire day to explore all the pieces.

The items on display will rotate.

The old art gallery is still here.

After an expansion and renovation, it reopened to the public in 1978.

>>The collection of Rollins started back in the 1930s with some gifts of old masters and continued to grow through the 20th century.

Right now we are at about a little bit more than 6,000 works of art in the collection, and it spans the centuries with really strong collections in European old masters, American art and global contemporary art.

What's unique about the Rollins Museum of Art is that it is part of a college, we're the only one in our community to be part of a university or college.

And that means that our mission is very squarely centered on learning and on accessibility.

So everything we do, we do with that in mind, and we program the same way for our students as for our community.

So there's a different approach to art.

There's a different approach to learning, which has to do with the values of a liberal arts education.

>>That mission is just one of four components, making the Rollins Museum of Art unique.

It's the only museum in the area to collect European art pieces and paintings from the old masters.

It offers Spanish programing by the curator monthly and a significant part of the collection of contemporary art is on display inside the Alfond Inn.

>>We encourage dialog with the art and we look at art as a window onto larger conversations.

We encourage people to come at art from different points of view, encourage different and multiple perspectives so we can expand the dialog and engage people who are not necessarily museum goers.

>>The best part?

You don't have to be a student, a member of staff or an alum of Rollins to check out the museum.

It's free.

>>Come here give me a hug it's so good to see you.

How are you?

Come in!

Take a chair, there's some chairs, you can take a chair and sit in it.

>>If you're performing arts fan, you can still see a live production inside the Annie Russell Theater on Rollins campus.

The theater was built in 1932, and it is the oldest continuously operating theater in the state of Florida.

Not even a global pandemic could cut a performance.

>>It was a gift of friendship from Mary Curtis Bok Zimbalist, who lived here in Winter Park.

>>That friend was Annie Russell, who at the time was a working actor in London and New York, where she gained a great reputation.

>>She wooed Annie Russell to come and retire in Winter Park by saying there's this nascent college and I want to build a theater and I want to name it after you and I want you to run it until you're really retired.

That's an amazing story that she came here and Annie was the first me, sort of choosing the plays that they did.

She also appeared in plays.

So the fact that it started as a gift of friendship has always impacted me.

For a long time, for decades, the Annie was the only game in town.

If you wanted to see a play and you didn't go into Orlando.

We were it.

>>Right next door to the Annie Russell Theater is the Knowles Memorial Chapel were the area's first Bach Festival took place.

>>We started in 1935, right here in this building, and to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the passing of J.S.

Bach, it was so popular the first year they decided we need to keep doing it.

>>And keep it going they did.

It's the third oldest continuously running Bach Festival.

And if you've never been... >>We are a completely volunteer chorus and we bring in the world's greatest oratorio singers, soloists from around around the globe.

This is one of the most fascinating things for me.

We're not a only Central Florida choir.

They traveled from 11 counties.

>>And speaking of festivals, you may have heard of a few festivals hosted by the City of Winter Park.

>>The first one is the Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival that's held every year in the spring, actually in March.

And the second one is our Autumn Art Festival that's held in the fall.

>>These festivals bring close to 300,000 people annually to the area.

>>We have 30,000 people that live here and they choose to live here not just because of how wonderful the city is, but also because the arts and culture life.

And then thousands more vacation here for that same reason.

>>I think that when you think about central Florida as a whole, there's a misperception that there's a lack of arts and culture.

And Winter Park really closes the gap on that and provides an opportunity for our community to experience arts and culture with our museums, our beautiful library, our events center, our lakes and our parks, and so much more.

♪♪ >>Tucked off one of the curves of State Road 426 in Winter Park, you'll discover the Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens.

This hidden gem was once home to an artist whose personal story is one of perseverance and inspiration.

>>Albin Polasek was born in Moravia in 1879.

He came to the United States in 1901.

>>Polasek got his start in a small Minnesota town working at an alter carving factory.

It was here where he realized the need for a proper art education to advance his career.

His schooling paved the way for becoming the head of the sculpture department at the Art Institute in Chicago.

In Chicago, he met Ruth Sherwood, who would later become his wife.

They both retired and then moved to the Winter Park area.

>>He moved in on New Year's Day, 1950, and eight months later he had a very severe stroke and it left the left side of his body somewhat paralyzed.

And from that time on, he tried sometime to walk, but his leg wasn't stable enough, so he was in a wheelchair from that time forward.

>>Exploring his property at Winter Park, you can see he didn't allow his challenges with mobility to sidetrack his work.

>>We have dozens of art pieces all through the gardens.

And probably the ones that stand out to people would be "Man carving his own destiny."

There's a large limestone version of it that's out front, and he did that in this wheelchair with only the use of his right hand.

He had an assistant that he would have do the tapping, and he did the carving.

>>Polasek carved this piece nearly 40 times, all with slight variations because he felt it symbolized him.

Several of his sculptures had personal ties, including this one "Primeval struggle."

>>He did that for his hometown in what's now the Czech Republic.

And it was to symbolize the victory of the people of that part of the world over the German army.

And the German army is portrayed as the wolf.

And the man is taking care of it.

>>Following his death in 1965, he was buried in Winter Park's Palms Cemetery, right alongside Ruth.

He was inducted to the National Academy of Design and the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.

His home and gardens are now a snapshot in time, welcoming visitors with more than 200 pieces on display.

>>And he was dedicated every day to making things beautiful for other people.

He came to this country with nothing and he carved his own destiny through hard work and perseverance.

♪♪ >>Not far from the streets of Winter Park, you'll find the city of Oviedo known for its roaming chickens.

Winter Park also had a flock of feathered friends that would roam these cobblestone streets.

And although they've been relocated, you can still see their influence everywhere.

>>As you travel through the city, you may not know it first and you may not see it first.

But as you're here four more days and others, you might start seeing peacocks in different ways.

You might see them on our manhole covers, you'll see them a peacock head on the street signs.

You'll see large murals at our Winter Park village.

>>The fascination with peacocks in Winter Park can be traced back to former Rollins President Hugh McKean and his wife, Jeanette.

>>They were visiting Asia and saw a creature called a peacock, and he loved them and ordered a couple of them and they brought them and and set them free out on Wind Song and they reproduced and there was a huge population of them.

And of course they'd wander off the property.

The town kind of became known for the peacocks.

>>The birds are still located at the Genius preserve.

The land was once owned by Jeanette McKean's grandfather, Charles Hosmer Morse.

Her father, Dr. Richard Genius, built a Spanish style home there named Wind Song in 1936.

Hugh and Jeanette lived in the home located on the Eastern Shore, Lake Virginia, just across from Rollins College.

Today, the public can visit the preserve and see the peacocks only once a year during the annual Run for the Trees 5K footrace.

>>In 2004, one of the things that the city commission first asked when I came on board as director communications was to develop and design a new city seal.

The old seal that we had was very much dated, and the colors and the themes that were in there were still important, but didn't quite reflect who the City of Winter Park was.

But the new seal that we have now that showcases the peacock, it also was inspired by the Tiffany glass that is found at the Morse Museum.

At the same time, we also adopted the slogan tagline, actually, that was the "City of Culture and Heritage."

And you'll see that underneath the peacock city seal as well.

It's very nice to see other organizations and companies who want to relate to Winter Park using elements of the peacock in order to brand and associate with the City of Winter Park.

>>Well, now I better understand this peacock fountain here in downtown.

And I hope you learned something along the way during our ride through Winter Park.

Thanks for joining us for this edition of Florida Road Trip.

I'm Scott Fais, I hope you'll join us again next week as we discover more of the history here in Florida that surrounds us all.

Safe travels, everyone.

♪♪ >>This program is brought to you in part by the Paul B.

Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation, a proud partner of WUCF and the Central Florida Community.