Audubon Park

Chapter One · 1937

A Plat Called Lakewood Estates

Audubon Park starts on paper, and the paper says a different name. Neighborhood histories date the plat of the neighborhood to 1937, under the name Lakewood Estates, with streets named after birds. It was a modest beginning for a district that would spend the next decades in the orbit of two military bases, and the bird streets drawn into that first plat are still the fastest way to understand the map.

Growth came with the war years. The same histories say growth accelerated in the 1940s and 1950s to house military families, and Main Street America describes Audubon Park as developed post World War II, long defined by a wide, four lane commercial main drag dotted with suburban strip malls. The plat supplied the grid and the birds. The bases supplied the people.

Chapter Two · The Name

A Name Lost to Time

Here is the honest version, because this district deserves it told straight. Visitor material says the neighborhood honors its namesake, the National Audubon Society, and that its tree lined streets are named after birds. The bird streets are real, and you can read them off the signs today. The rest of that sentence is tradition, not record.

Orlando Magazine states the documented version: Audubon Park was originally known as Lakewood Estates, the how and when of the transition have been lost to time, and the official history attributes the change to the naming of several streets for birds, similar to the way nearby College Park reflects its streets named for institutions of higher learning. No source consulted documents a developer choosing the Audubon name, a request to the Society, or permission from it. So the National Audubon Society story is told on this page as the tradition it is, not as the record it is not.

The 407 FYI Flashbacks card for the district ends with the practical advice: look out the window instead of at your phone, because the street signs are a bird guide. Whatever committee, clerk or custom carried the name from Lakewood Estates to Audubon Park left no paper behind. The birds left theirs on every corner.

Chapter Three · The Military Decades

Built for the Bases

The military connection is the district's defining era. Beginning in World War II and through most of the Cold War, Orlando was home to two high profile military installations, Naval Training Center Orlando and McCoy Air Force Base. McCoy was the region's largest employer before Walt Disney World opened in 1971. Until the Naval Training Center's decommissioning in 1999, these bases brought countless service people and their families to the area, many of whom built homes in Audubon Park.

The houses tell that story in building materials. Orlando Magazine gives the housing stock a 1950s character, describing cinderblock and terrazzo homes and the area's history as off base housing for the former Orlando Naval Training Center. McCoy Air Force Base itself was in use from 1940 to 1975, and its site is now Orlando International Airport, which keeps the MCO code from McCoy.

Even the main street is a military artifact. Corrine Drive was originally constructed to service heavy equipment on the way to the Naval Training Center from 17-92, and it was built before the area was even part of Orlando, according to the city, as reported by Bungalower. The road that now carries the district's restaurants was graded for base traffic first.

Chapter Four · 1936 to 1961

The Garden on the Eastern Edge

While the bases were building the district's west side, its eastern edge was becoming a garden. Harry P. Leu Gardens sits at 1920 North Forest Avenue on the eastern edge of Audubon Park, at 50 acres. Harry P. and Mary Jane Leu purchased the property in 1936 and traveled extensively, bringing back plants and seeds from their trips.

In 1961, the house and gardens were part of the Leu gift to the City of Orlando. A private estate assembled plant by plant became public ground, and it stayed the district's green anchor through everything that followed: the base years, the base closure, and the rebranding that would eventually take its cue, and its name, from the garden.

Chapter Five · 1999 to 2016

After the Base, the Garden District

The Naval Training Center closed in phases, and all remaining operations ceased on April 30, 1999. A neighborhood built to house a base could have faded with it. Audubon Park rebranded instead. The community remade itself as the Audubon Park Garden District, in honor of Harry P. Leu Gardens, and the Garden District Main Street program dates to 2008.

The proof of the rebrand is a church that became a food hall. East End Market, the district's food hub, opened on November 1, 2013 in a former church building, and Main Street America credits the district with transforming a foreclosed church into a nationally recognized food and culture hub. In 2016, the district won the Great American Main Street Award. Two years earlier, in 2014, Audubon Park had become the first neighborhood in Central Florida recognized as a Wildlife Habitat Community, certified through the National Wildlife Federation. The garden district name, it turned out, was also a description.

The Index in the Street Signs

How the Streets Got Their Names

Audubon Park's street signs are a field guide with one honest exception. The birds are documented, street by street. The main street's namesake is not, and this panel keeps both facts in the same place.

The Story, On Foot

Walk It Today

Walk the military main street first, because that is what Corrine Drive still is, under newer signs. Start at East End Market and work the corridor the guide walks: Coro and Foreigner Restaurant for dinner, Sushi Lola's and Kelly's Homemade Ice Cream along the drive, and inside the market, Domu, Hinckley's Fancy Meats, Lineage Coffee Roasting and Winter Park Biscuit Company. Every address on the route sits a street or two from a bird.

Then walk the birds themselves, Falcon to Cardinal to Dove, out to the Audubon Park Community Market on East Winter Park Road, and finish at the district's eastern edge in Leu Gardens, on the ground the Leus bought in 1936 and gave to the city in 1961. Plat, bases, garden: the whole story is one slow loop, and the street signs narrate it if you read them like a field guide.

From the Flashbacks

More history