Lake Nona

Chapter One · Ranch Land

The Country Before the District

Until the mid 1980s, the land along Narcoossee Road in southeast Orange County was cattle ranch, citrus grove, pine flatwoods and wetland, with scattered homes only at Isle of Pines and around Lake Whippoorwill and Lake Hart. There was no district here, no town center, no hospital row. There was a road, a scatter of lakes, and country that Orlando had not yet reached.

The older settlement sat just south, in Narcoossee and St. Cloud. English settlers arrived there in the 1880s, and Joel T. Tyson and his family had settled in Narcoossee in 1849 as cattle ranchers, citrus growers and farmers. The names of that first settlement never left the map: many Lake Nona area road names, Tyson, Tindall, Jones, Jack Brack, Runnymede and Thompkins among them, are named after those early English settlers.

Access came late, and it explains the timing of everything that followed. Construction on State Road 417 began in 1989, and its Southern Connector opened in 1993. For most of its history, this corner of Orange County was ranch land partly because it was hard to get to. Once the expressway arrived, it stopped being far away.

Chapter Two · Legend and Record

Miss Nona, and the Limits of the Record

What is documented is that the community took the name of the lake, and the lake's name is older than the development. Lake Nona is a real lake, 587 acres in the Lake Hart watershed, and it carried that name on United States Geological Survey topographic maps, the Pine Castle quadrangle, long before anyone drew a master plan. Tavistock did not invent the name. It adopted one that was already on the federal survey record.

Who Nona was is not documented, and the story belongs in the legend column, labeled as one. Local tradition holds that the lake was named for a matriarch of one of the area's early homesteading families, remembered as Miss Nona. As far as any published source goes, there is no deed, no plat, no surname and no dates behind her. The documented origin stops at the lake name on federal survey maps, and the person behind Nona, if there was one, remains undocumented.

The research checked the other stories too. Family naming claims beyond Miss Nona, a Houghton or Carr ranch story among them, and a ninth lake claim were looked for in credible sources and are not documented either. This page prints the lake, the map, and the legend with its label on, and stops there.

Chapter Three · 1986 to 1996

A Golf Course First, Then a Plan, Then a Buyer

Modern Lake Nona began with a golf course, not a hospital. Lake Nona Golf and Country Club opened for play in 1986, a Tom Fazio design on roughly 600 acres, built while the surrounding land was still pasture and before any expressway or master plan reached it. The club was serious from the start: it hosted the inaugural Solheim Cup in 1990 and the World Cup of Golf in 1993.

Planning and purchase followed a decade later. In 1995, the City of Orlando initiated its Southeast Sector Plan, the zoning and land use framework that designated the quadrant for large scale mixed use growth instead of leaving it agricultural. In 1996, the Tavistock Group acquired the golf club and about 4,000 adjoining acres, and grew its holdings over the years to roughly 7,000 acres. The community that resulted covers 17 square miles inside the Orlando city limits, southeast of Orlando International Airport.

Chapter Four · 2005 to 2015

Medical City, the Hinge

Everything before Medical City is prologue. In October 2005, the Tavistock Group donated $12.5 million and 50 acres of land to the University of Central Florida to help establish a medical school at Lake Nona. On March 23, 2006, the Florida Board of Governors voted 15 to 1 to approve UCF's proposal to build a medical college here, and the school greeted its first students in fall 2009.

The buildings opened in a tight sequence on the 650 acre health and life sciences park. Sanford-Burnham's medical research institute opened in May 2009, alongside UCF's Health Sciences Campus. In 2012, the University of Florida Research and Academic Center opened, and Nemours Children's Hospital opened and began accepting patients.

The Orlando VA Medical Center began seeing clinical patients in February 2015, completing the founding row: a medical college, a research institute, a university research center, a children's hospital and a veterans hospital, all planted within a few years on land that had been ranch and grove a generation earlier. Laureate Park, the residential enclave built to house the Medical City workforce, had opened in 2011, while the hospitals were still rising.

The Index in the Street Signs

How the Streets Got Their Names

A young district writes its street signs in the open: a Creek word on the old road south, a developer's name on the new boulevards, and one neighborhood whose streets are a roll of honor for science.

The Story, On Foot

Walk It Today

Start at the Town Center, the district's front room, and graze it the way the guide lays it out: Boxi Park Lake Nona for the open air, a table at Canvas Restaurant & Market or Chroma Modern Bar + Kitchen, pizza at Park Pizza & Brewing Company, and the dining rooms at Nami and Bacán when the occasion calls for theater with dinner.

Then go looking for the older layers. Nona Adventure Park puts you back on the water, the element this district was named for before it was built. Lake Nona Deli and Market keeps the neighborhood fed day to day. And a drive down Narcoossee Road, past the Tyson and Runnymede signs, runs you out of the newest district in Orlando along the oldest names it has.