A grownup's guide to Orlando, Florida

From Tiffany's chapel to smoked salmon potato galette, there's more to Central Florida than theme parks

By Alan Solomon, Chicago Tribune Reporter
05:22 PM PDT, April 22, 2008

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ORLANDO, Florida -- Cities, with the exception of greater Las Vegas, aren't built for amusement. They're built to function as market hubs and transport hubs and government hubs, and then people build houses to be near the jobs generated by all that hubness.

Gradually come places to buy shoes and clothespins and Grape Nuts and wing nuts, and places to pray and go to school, maybe a cafe or two, and in the best towns there arrives a bit of entertainment -- a movie theater, a club for social mingling with a little music on the side.

Still with me?

If business is good and extremely wealthy people have more money than they can spend guilt-free on themselves, culture happens -- all downtown.

It happened pretty much this way in Orlando. Sherry Lewis of the Orange County Regional History Center remembers that Orlando.

"When I was growing up here," she says, "downtown was it. We shopped downtown, we ate downtown."

And then downtown stopped being it, for a variety of reasons. It stopped being much of anything.

"The Orlando of the '50s that I grew up in? There's absolutely no resemblance to the Orlando we see today."

Which, while enjoying something of a revival, isn't bustling.

Why? Briefly, as with many mid-size cities in all regions, the interstate highway system made it easier to live 20 miles away from the downtown shops and offices, which begat malls to serve the newly installed residents, which begat office buildings alongside the malls. Downtowns withered.

In the South, especially, there were contributing factors, but I'm running out of space.

Now, specifically in Orlando, there was something else:

"There's no doubt about it," says Lewis. "In 1971, with Disney ... "

When Walt Disney World opened 20 miles southwest of the city in 1971 -- with hotels both within and neighboring the property -- the city, in perception if not reality, became a place to bypass. Universal Studios opened two decades later, technically part of Orlando but 11 miles from downtown; that, plus a new business-convention corridor near Universal, plus its proximity to Disney, spawned more hotels and restaurants -- down there.

Not up here.

You've got the picture.

Then why come into the city at all? Because if you poke around, you still find, even in Orlando, all the things that make cities wonderful.

Only in a real city will you find, in an art museum, a painting with a title like this: "In the beginning there was borscht, and then came the thought of liver." Done partly in beet juice.

Here are some of the joys of this city -- downtown and in the neighborhoods -- that are particularly suited for grownups and particularly for grownups weary of being blocked by convoys of baby strollers from getting to, say, Universal's incomparable "Spider-Man" thrill ride.

Loch Haven Park

Not only a park (and a loch), but home to a bevy of cultural and educational venues, including the Orlando Science Center, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando Repertory Theatre and the Mennello Museum of American Art.

The Science Center is your basic kids museum, so skip that, unless you absolutely must see a dinosaur, need to press buttons or are one of the eight people left in American who hasn't experienced some variation of "Titanic: The Experience." The Rep's rep is primarily "family" shows ("You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," "Go, Dog! Go!"), not that there's anything wrong with that.

The Mennello, a compact venue, has a small permanent collection of folk art and intriguing temporary exhibits, notably one featuring the work of Earl Cunningham that's already moved to New York's American Folk Art Museum. (It'll be back next March.)

It's the Big Art Museum that's the star here. As with many regional museums, the collection isn't vast -- but unlike the others, what's here is very, very good. Its O'Keeffe ("Datura and Pedernal") is quintessential Georgia (flower, New Mexico; also here is fine work by John Singer Sargent and landscapists Thomas Moran and Herman Herzog. You just missed a delightful exhibition justly called "Audacity in Art" -- the "borscht" work, by a Vietnamese artist, was a highlight -- but there's a Rockwell show on through Memorial Day. Also, an excellent "Ancient Americas" collection, if you're into that -- and, of course, a Chihuly. Not talking the MoMA here, but better than you'd imagine ...

Orange County Regional History Center

Look for the statue of the guy wrangling an alligator in the heart of downtown, and you'll find this museum beside him, fashioned from the former county courthouse. Among the exhibits is a series of photos of a sinkhole that almost swallowed Winter Park in 1981 (and, of course, became a major tourist attraction for a while), much information on the local Seminoles (the real ones, not Bobby Bowden's Florida State teams), and chilling material on the African-American experience in the area. (The Groveland story will leave you shaking your head.)

Also intriguing: a courtroom, left whole.

"The Bundy trial was here," said the center's Sherry Lewis. "We can't give eyewitness confirmation that he was the one who carved his name into the desk, but ... "

In 1980, Ted Bundy was convicted here in the 1978 rape-murder of a 12-year-old Florida girl, Kimberly Leach. She would be his 29th, and last, victim.

Someone left a carving.

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