Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Funny business
Pile into your tiny car and head for Lake Placid clown school.
A couple hours’ drive northwest from the bustle and beaches of South Florida sits a little town that thinks big. Lake Placid was named after the famous Lake Placid in the New York Adirondack mountains at the suggestion of Dr. Melvil Dewey, namesake of the famed Dewey Decimal System. Apparently, inventing a proprietary library classification system just isn’t enough for some people.
As you would expect, there’s a lake named Placid here, and it isn’t the only one in the region — there are 27 to be exact. People come here to boat, fish, golf, take a winery tour, ride an airboat and get away from the hectic pace of life.
Sure, you say, lots of places have pretty lakes, a bit of quirky history and all that relaxing fun. What makes Lake Placid stand out?
Murals
Back in 1992, the Lake Placid Mural Society was formed and 47 murals have since been painted throughout the town. These aren’t edgy, in-yourface Wynwood, Miamitype expressions. Rather, they tell the town’s history with wit and whimsy more in a Norman Rockwell vein. Many feature tromp l’oeil technique — use of realistic imagery to create optical illusions — and some border on the surreal, but with an overall small town sweetness. And, as if the impressive craftsmanship and compositions weren’t eye-popping enough, the artists added hidden messages that you can try to find by consulting your mural guidebook available at the Chamber of Commerce Welcome Center office. There, you will also find a mural art gallery, featuring the small-scale paintings of each mural that the artists did to gain approval from the town.
As an added bonus, there are also 17 artist-decorated trash containers that are companion pieces to the murals, including ones resembling a safe by the bank, a train by the depot museum and a jack-in-thebox by the clown college (What? Your town doesn’t have a clown college? More on that later). Forty-five plaques depicting birds indigenous to Lake Placid are also scattered about the town.
If you’ve got a lot of energy, and it isn’t a stiflingly hot Florida summer day, you could walk and see the murals in one day, but nobody rushes around in this town so a better plan is to mosey around a bit longer to see them all. Or, you can bring your own bus. A Lake Placid mural pro will board and narrate a 90-minute guided tour for only $6 per person, if you give them enough notice.
Caladiums
Lake Placid bills itself as the Caladium Capital of the World. What’s a caladium? A plant native to South America that grows from a tuber, or compressed stem, in the shape of a large red, pink, white or green arrowhead. They’re commonly known as elephant ears and angel wings. In the 1950s, caladiums became big business in these parts — so much so that today approximately 95 percent of the world’s caladium are from Lake Placid. Each year the town puts on a caladium festival with arts and crafts, a wine tasting, a beer garden, an antique car and bike show, a 5k race, and caladiums, caladiums, caladiums. This year it’s July 28-30. If you can’t make the festival, you can still drive down County Road 621 past the town’s 1,500 acres of caladium fields that bloom throughout the summer.
Clowns
There’s a place where you can study to become a clown (besides Washington, D.C., some would say) in Lake Placid. Toby’s Clown Museum and School, also known as the American Clown Museum and School, was founded by Keith Stokes, aka Toby the Clown, in 1993. Enrollees learn makeup, facial expressions, acting movements, skits, one-liners, magic tricks and (drumroll, please) balloon art. The school takes clowning seriously — those are big shoes to fill, after all — and boasts over 2,500 graduates.
The museum contains over 700 pieces of clown memorabilia including artwork by TV’s Red Skelton and original posters from Ringling Brothers. Admission is free, so hurry, hurry, hurry.
A towering oddity
Lake Placid has another bit of eccentricity: a decommissioned 270-foot brick observation tower. When it was built on Route 27 in 1961, it was known as one of the world’s tallest concrete towers. Later, in an attempt to draw in more customers, it was rechristened the Happiness Tower. Over the years, attendance fell off and by the 1980s, it was shut down, reopened, and then shuttered for good in the 2000s. It sits in a lonesome, abandoned plaza with a sign on its top that can be seen for miles that ironically says “Open.” Still, it does make a good landmark, and when you see it, you really know you’ve arrived in Florida’s muralloving, caladium-crazy town. Send in the clowns — don’t bother, they’re here.