Winter Garden Comes Back
In the 1990s, Winter Garden started betting on something unusual.
Its past.
The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency had been created in 1992, and preservation efforts were beginning to gain momentum.
Then came a particularly important fight.
Plans emerged to demolish the historic Edgewater Hotel.
The Winter Garden Heritage Foundation formed in 1994, and preservationists increasingly pushed to protect the physical pieces of Winter Garden’s history rather than simply replacing them.
You can read more about that effort directly from the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation.
Instead of treating the old buildings as obstacles to redevelopment, Winter Garden increasingly treated them as assets.
In 1996, the downtown historic district was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Then another piece fell into place.
The railroad corridor that had once carried citrus through the center of town found a completely new purpose as part of the West Orange Trail.
People returned downtown.
Only this time they arrived on bicycles instead of freight trains.
Restaurants opened.
Shops occupied old buildings.
Historic structures were restored and reused.
The Garden Theatre — originally built as a movie house in 1935 and closed in 1963 — was eventually restored and reopened in 2008.
Plant Street became a destination again.
And here’s what makes Winter Garden’s revival work so well:
They didn’t recreate an imaginary old Florida town.
They still had one.
The brick buildings are real.
The railroad history is real.
The citrus history is real.
The Edgewater is real.
The street grid is real.
Modern Winter Garden simply figured out how to make those things useful again.
And the transportation corridor that helped create Winter Garden in the nineteenth century is still bringing people downtown.
It just traded locomotives for bicycles, strollers and somebody inevitably walking a golden retriever.
That’s a pretty good second act.
