College Park goes mod with latest homes architecture tour
If someone mentions Orlando’s College Park neighborhood, you might well conjure up visions of shady streets lined with cozy bungalows like those once inhabited in the 1950s by the iconic writer Jack Kerouac or Orlando’s hometown astronaut, John Young.
But as organizers of the upcoming College Park Tour of Homes note, the area’s architecture reaches far beyond the bungalow, reflecting the growth of College Park through the decades. In shaping the Nov. 11 tour, they’ve focused on College Park’s distinguished Mid-Century Modern and Modern architecture. “Celebrating the Mod in Modern,” the tour logo proclaims.
The self-guided tour begins at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on Westmoreland Avenue and features homes designed by architects including Manfred Lopatka, Ernest Rapp and Nils Schweizer (the subject of a recent Flashback).
“These homes were designed and built to be unique personalities with style,” tour organizers Mary Travis, Becky Dreisbach and Dusty Sutton note. Folks who venture on the tour “will experience adventures in design.”
Legacy in the skyline
Mid-Century Modern residences were often single-story horizontal structures that featured glass walls, low-pitch roofs, and unconventional schemes that emphasized architectural creativity. Hallmarks of the style include angular details and clean lines.
The architects featured in the tour also had considerable expertise with larger structures. Richard Boone Rogers, the architect of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church (where the tour begins), designed the streamlined 1947 Wellborn Apartments (now part of the Courtyard at Lake Lucerne) and the 1960s OUC administration building that in 2013 was renovated to become the Aloft Orlando Downtown hotel.
Rapp, another architect represented in the tour, designed restaurants and subdivisions in New York before moving in 1956 to Orlando, where his buildings ranged from the State Office Building to the Imperial House restaurant in Winter Park.
As Rapp’s 2008 obituary noted, he began specializing in economical housing for older people in the 1960s. He designed high-rise towers in Orlando including the Kinneret Apartments, Lucerne Towers, Magnolia Towers, Orlando Central Towers, Baptist Towers and Calvary Towers. He also designed similar buildings in Miami, Jacksonville, Atlanta and Nashville, Tenn.
Rapp and Lopatka were immigrants to the United States after World War II who had survived the Holocaust. A teenager in 1938, Rapp was “removed from his high school in Austria and endured months of persecution from the Nazis before he was able to escape his homeland,” his obituary noted. Lopatka, who died in 2016 at 93, came to the United States from Germany in 1949 after surviving the Dachau concentration camp, according to tour notes.
A longtime legacy
This year’s 27th tour continues a legacy of College Park home tours highlighting the area’s history. The first such tour, organized by historicpreservation expert Grace Hagedorn in 1991, featured the area near Dubsdread Golf Course, including the Dubsdread Circle house that was once home to Tupperware legend Brownie Wise. The house is on this year’s tour again, “bringing us full circle,” organizers say.
The subject of Bob Kealing’s book “Tupperware Unsealed,” Wise was the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week magazine. In the 1950s, she was both the driving force behind making Tupperware a household name and a pioneer in making home parties a popular and income-producing platform, especially for women. A picture in Kealing’s book shows Wise with Earl Tupper in front of the Dubsdread Circle house.
If you go
The College Park Neighborhood Association’s 27th Tour of Homes is set for Nov. 11 from 1 to 5 p.m. The self-guided tour begins at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, 2499 N. Westmoreland Drive, in Orlando. College Park Neighborhood Association members may receive two free wristbands (free admission) at check-in for the tour at St. Michael’s. General admission is $25 per person. Veterans receive free admission in honor of Veterans Day. The tour benefits College Park schools through the association’s Welborn Hagedorn Grant program. For more, visit mycpna.org (click on 2018 Tour of Homes), write vp@mycpna.org or call 813-545-1695.