Highland Manor key to Apopka city center
A 110-room hotel and a renovated Victorian-style mansion will anchor Apopka’s long-anticipated city center complex at U.S. Highway 441 and State Road 436, the project’s developer said.
Hilton Hotels & Resorts will build a Hilton Garden Inn on land near the Highland Manor, a 114-year-old historic country house with links to both good times and bad in Apopka, said Jeff McFadden, managing partner of Taurus Orlando, the city center’s developer.
The development company is closing in on more deals to bring other restaurants and retailers to the project expected to reshape Orange County’s second-largest city and its eastern gateway, but McFadden declined to name any until contracts are signed.
Apopka Mayor Joe Kilsheimer is eager to see shovels turn.
“It is, in all capital letters, THE downtown development project that Apopka residents have been awaiting for decades,” he said.
“Originally we didn’t think [Highland Manor] would survive. It’s now incorporated as an integral part of our overall plan.” Jeff McFadden, of Taurus Orlando, Apopka’s city center developer
The manor, under many former names, has been a part of other big Apopka dreams, all of which turned to dust.
“Originally we didn’t think this would survive,” McFadden said of the turreted manor, located on 11 acres on Martin’s Pond at the southwest corner of U.S. 441 and S.R. 436. “It’s now incorporated as an integral part of our overall plan.”
It occupies arguably the city center project’s most valuable piece of property.
Though operated as a wedding venue since 2008, many Apopkans identify the Highland Manor by its previous incarnations, including the surf-and-turf restaurant the Captain and the Cowboy, Townsend’s Plantation and, originally, T.E. “Doc Tommy” McBride’s house.
McBride, who died in 1979, was one of Apopka’s first physicians.
He was the last resident of the home, built in 1903. But the kitchen was the scene of a fatal shooting in 1956 that led to a murder indictment against the doctor’s wife, Helen, a noted aviatrix who competed in crosscountry flying races for women.
She shot Charles R. Green four times, twice in the back, according to archived newspaper accounts.
Green, 33, a World War II veteran and 16 years younger than the doctor’s wife, previously lived with the family for several years, though Helen McBride described him as a business partner in Central Florida Flying Services. Her husband, then 60, said in a court hearing that Green “was for all intents and purposes my son.”
Helen McBride claimed self-defense and was acquitted after a fourday trial. She died in 1961.
Some residents remember when the McBride home was relocated in 1985 from North Highland Avenue near Kit Land Nelson Park by crews who cut it into sections and paraded it late at night through Apopka’s streets to its current site on Martin’s Pond.
It served as a restaurant from 1987 until 1997, when it closed amid plans to convert the property into an assisted-living facility.
The manor, which once was dressed up like a haunted house for Halloween, hosted Civil War re-enactments, a reggae festival and the final political party for John Land, the longest-serving mayor in Florida history. But the feteing of Land, Apopka’s mayor for 61 years, turned out to be a somber occasion on April 8, 2014, as he lost his re-election bid that day.
He died seven months later at age 94.
“This place gives people of Apopka a historical connection to the [city center] project,” said Steve Gunter, owner of Dubsdread Catering, which has catered weddings and receptions at the manor for six years. “Their heartstrings are tied to this building in a big way.”
Apopka bought the mansion and surrounding acres for $9.6 million in 2006 and the venue hosted weddings and banquets. But the city has evicted restaurant-catering businesses twice. Gunter’s predecessor was accused of leaving brides at the altar and bolting with reception deposits.
“You don’t mess with brides,” said Kathy Pierson, a spokeswoman for Gunter. “Steve has been so successful with this property that Highland Manor has gone from being a poisonous name in the wedding industry to one of the most soughtafter locations in Central Florida.”
The number of nuptials at Highland Manor more than quadrupled from 27 in 2012 to 110 last year.
Wedding and specialevent sales soared, too, from $350,000 in 2012 to $1.25 million last year.
Those figures intrigued developers, who many assumed would bulldoze the mansion.
McFadden said the hotel and manor could complement one another.
Renovations, estimated at $350,000, will begin soon on the manor and its wraparound porch, which looks out on the pond and an ancient oak under which lovestruck couples exchange vows.
“I think there’s a lot of synergy between the two,” he said.
The city center, planned for 35 acres that Apopka sold to Taurus in 2016 for $5.2 million, is a mixed-use development that will include apartments, medical offices, restaurants and shopping venues. McFadden said the hotel groundbreaking likely will be in early 2018.
“We’re working hard on what the tenant mix is going to be, to have the right restaurants, the right retail so it kind of all flows,” McFadden said. “Adding a hotel and a multi-family [residential] component drives the retail and vice-versa.”
Kilsheimer predicted that, when finished, the development will be worth more than $100 million.
“It will attract the kind of critical mass of customers you need to make it financially feasible,” he said.