Historic ‘places that matter’ often hide in plain sight
Like me, you may have zipped along Magnolia Avenue in Orlando, focused on reaching Interstate 4, with no idea you were rushing past one of the city’s oldest houses.
I’m talking about the block of Magnolia just past Livingston Street, where the Marriott Orlando Downtown now occupies the corner where a Travelodge sat for decades. There, in 1885, at what’s now 419 N. Magnolia, Samuel A. Robinson built a glorious home that looked out on a vast orange grove.
Announcing the home’s construction in 1884, the Orange County Reporter hailed it as “one of the best and most substantial houses in Orlando.” The running water supplied by a hose to a faucet on the back porch was considered outrageously modern at the time. The house also featured plate-glass windows and a widow’s walk — a platform on the roof surrounded by a balustrade — which Robinson had built for stargazing with his daughters.
Amazingly, both the widow’s walk and Robinson’s creation (which has long housed offices) are still there, hidden almost in plain sight on a busy one-way street across from the skyscraper Orange County Courthouse.
The house endured a fire in 1890 and has changed a bit over the years. It now boasts four large columns (one of which is missing) that were added long after Robinson’s day, Orlando historian Tana Porter details its history in a recent article on the Orange County Regional History Center’s website, noting that it was recently listed for sale — the kind of thing that makes fans of historic preservation nervous because, unlike many other Orlando historic sites, the 137-year-old house has no protection as an official city landmark.
A month that matters
The need to preserve sites that help tell a community’s story, and our nation’s story, inspired the National Trust for Historic Preservation to designate May as Historic Preservation Month almost 50 years ago, in 1973. The National Trust has called these sites “places that matter.” Their architecture can be elaborate or simple.
Increasingly, those places include sites that tell stories of folks too often left out of history, such as the 1925 Orlando home of legendary midwife Mary Johnson, which has been nominated for designation as an Orlando historic landmark, as the Sentinel reported earlier this year.
The house Sam Robinson built in 1885 helps tell the story of Orlando and Orange County’s early years. Robinson, who died in 1926, came to the city in 1876. “A civil engineer, he established a surveying practice in Central Florida and worked for 17 years as Orange County’s surveyor,” historian Porter writes. “He also served as tax assessor and tax collector, alderman, school trustee, and city surveyor, in addition to two terms in the state Legislature. Robinson laid out Orlando’s downtown streets, and with J. Otto Fries, he surveyed the new Greenwood Cemetery.” Orlando’s busy Robinson Street is named for him.
Time to get snapping
During Robinson’s years as county surveyor and also city engineer, he filed many of the plats for an area not far from his 1885 home: Orlando’s Park Lake/Highland
neighborhood, which will be featured in the 2023 Orlando Historic Preservation calendar.
The city’s new historic preservation officer, Jennifer Fritz-Hunter, recently announced Park Lake/ Highland as the subject of the popular black-andwhite calendar the board has produced since 1991, with images chosen by a photo competition. The deadline for submission this year is 5 p.m. July 11, and it’s not too early to get snapping.
The Park Lake/Highland Neighborhood is bordered by Virginia Drive to the north, Mills Avenue to the east, Colonial Drive to the south and Highland Avenue to the west. Homes and other buildings in the neighborhood reflect a wide variety of early- to mid-20th-century styles and architectural trends, Fritz-Hunter notes, including Bungalow, Colonial Revival, Contemporary, Craftsman, Dutch Colonial Revival, French Eclectic, Italian Renaissance Revival, Mediterranean Revival, Mission, Monterey, Neoclassical Revival, Prairie, Ranch and Tudor Revival.
To be eligible for the calendar, subject matter should represent structures at least 50 years old (generally, pre-1970) and within the Park Lake/Highland neighborhood (note that the Robinson House is outside the area).
A $100 honorarium will be awarded to each photographer whose picture is selected for the 2023 Historic Preservation Board Calendar, sponsored by McCoy Federal Credit Union. Photos not labeled with a site address will be disqualified, FritzHunter notes. For questions about the calendar, photo competition or details about submissions, contact her at 407-246-3416 or Jennifer. Fritz-Hunter@orlando.gov.
To learn more
You can read more
about the Robinson House in Tana Porter’s article, “Historic Orlando House Threatened,” at TheHistoryCenter.org in the “Around the Museum Blog” section. For more about Historic Preservation Month, visit SavingPlaces.org. Learn about statewide preservation
through the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation, www.floridatrust.org. Other resources include the websites for Orange Preservation Trust (www.orangepreservationtrust.org), the Orlando Foundation for Architecture (OrlandoArchitecture.org) and the Friends
of Casa Feliz (CasaFeliz.us).