Titan of tires Harvey Firestone opened Orlando station in 1930
On a March morning in 1930, the opening of Orlando’s most glamorous automobile service station was so dazzling that the Sentinel devoted a whole page to it. The Orlando branch of Harvey Firestone’s empire had been designed to welcome travelers in high style at 578 N. Orange Ave. — the northern edge of downtown commercial development.
Firestone was then considered one of the top titans of American industry. He came to Orlando himself to launch what’s still called the Firestone Building. Constructed on a site Firestone personally selected in 1928, it remains one of the city’s rare commercial structures built between the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the end of the Great Depression.
Landmark since 1983
More than 40 years after it opened, the building still housed a Firestone business when it was declared an official Orlando historic landmark in 1983, at the instigation of Firestone representatives. Today, the city has more than 50 such landmarks, but the program was relatively new when the Firestone Building joined a growing list that began with venerable structures such as the Atlantic Coastline and Church Street railroad stations, declared official landmarks in 1978.
One 1983 appraisal declared the Firestone Building a “knock-out” in terms of its Art Deco and Mediterranean Revival architectural touches, so popular in Florida during the 1920s and 1930s. As a sign of their regard for it, company officials undertook a full restoration of the building in 1983 and even gave away a Model A sedan as a door prize at its reopening.
By 1991, though, Harvey Firestone’s successors decided to close their Orange Avenue location — news announced in the Sentinel under a punny headline declaring “After 61 years, Orlando garage tired out.” But
The Firestone Building at 578 N. Orange Ave. first opened its doors March 1, 1930. Orlando’s City Council declared it an official city historic landmark in 1983. the building lived on through adaptive reuse as the site of several nightclubs over the years.
Although altered in minor ways, it retains its historic integrity, according to a recent Orlando preservation staff report that responded to a request by its owner, Harrold Productions, to remove its landmark designation.
The recommendation of the staff and the city’s Historic Preservation Board, voting on April 7, was that the Firestone Building also retain its Orlando landmark designation, which offers some protection from destruction. Changes to landmarks are possible but are reviewed by the city’s advisory Historic Preservation Board.
It’s possible for decisions by the Historic Preservation Board to be changed by the City Council, for whom such citizen boards operate in an advisory manner. Such reversals are rare. Here’s hoping the Firestone Building, once the northern anchor of Orlando’s downtown and still a commercial building of great distinction, continues as some part of the city’s continuing transformation.
Setting record straight
Holly Carpenter, longtime Orlando Shakes volunteer, writes to correct
a recent Flashback that gave a 1988 date for the theater company’s debut. What began as the Orlando Shakespeare Festival — and then the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and finally Orlando Shakes — can trace its origins at least to 1988, when the group’s founder, Stuart Omans of the University of Central Florida, was at work on the festival in an office near Lake Eola.
But Carpenter is right that the inaugural season was in November 1989. Plans had targeted an April opening but were changed when the refurbished amphitheater at Lake Eola could not be ready in time. So what’s become an Orlando theatrical institution debuted “right when the first cold snap of the season hit,” Carpenter recalls. “I remember because I was there freezing all through it and suffered for the arts. They then took a break for a year before moving the season to the spring months.” It’s a great heritage, continuing with the Shakes’ “Little Shop of Horrors” at Lake Eola May 5-23.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at joydickinson@icloud. com, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter to Florida Flashback, c/o Dickinson, P.O. Box 1942, Orlando, FL 32802.