May is Historic Preservation Month

May is Historic Preservation Month. It’s a great time to renew your membership in preservation organizations such as the National Trust, Florida Trust and Orange Preservation Trust. Consider using their travel guides when making vacation plans this summer. Some of these memberships include discounts on accommodations, as well as entry fees to attractions and museums. Memberships also great make great gifts.

https://savingplaces.org/stories/preservation-month-2023?gad=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwmN2iBhCrARIsAG_G2i5EIoA1iZ8EI38QNurv0kTvnMT9GLp2VBK6bKCSrb8L7L-UyRhE41oaAuCEEALw_wcB

https://www.floridatrust.org/

Broadway United Methodist Church 100 Year Anniversary Celebration, Orlando, FL

ALL OUR WELCOME!

APRIL 24 TH , 10:00 am – 3:00 pm

·      10:00 am – 11:00 am Introduction to photo exhibits & historical displays

·      11:00 – 12:00 Remembrance sharing in the Sanctuary

·      12:00 – 3:00 pm Return to the photo exhibits & historical displays

Call or text Val Mobley 407-648-1134 for information or questions.

The History

Broadway United Methodist Church, on the corner of Broadway Avenue and Amelia Street in the Lake Eola Heights Historic District Orlando, FL, will be celebrating 100 years on APRIL 24, 2022. Experience the church’s past in pictures, historical displays and hear remembrances. The original church building was not on the corner of North Lake Street (as it was known in 1922) but on the lot next door to the corner lot. The wood frame, single story building was erected in 1922 by the men of the congregation in a single day.

Since over 100 people joined the new church at its first service, everyone realized that a larger building would be needed. Plans were made almost immediately to build a bigger church. The original name of the new church was North Lake Street Methodist Church, South.

In 1925 Rev. J. L. Criswell was appointed as pastor. He was the planner, architect and builder of the church as it stands today. The new building was to be built on the corner lot next door to the original building. The city changed the name of the street to Broadway in 1927, so the church changed its name then to Broadway Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

The original wood frame building was torn down when construction began on the new building. A basement was dug (with the help of horses from a traveling circus that was in town) and the lumber from the original building was used to provide a roof for this new basement. That way the church would be dry while holding services until the 2 upper stories were completed in 1927. In December of that year a cornerstone was laid with a time capsule inside. Placed in the time capsule were a Bible, membership roster, list of building committee members and copies of the local newspapers.

As time marched on an elevator was installed as well as A/C in 1956. Hurricane Donna in 1960 was the first time that services were not held – the basement flooded. The church withstood Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jean in 2004 without needing to close. However, the pandemic of 2020 caused closures.

 In January 1980 a fire in the sanctuary caused extensive damage. The stained-glass windows survived the fire intact due to the heroic efforts of the Orlando Fire Department. The congregation shared space with the Concord United Methodist Church for almost a year until the repairs were completed.

The Lake Eola Heights Community Garden was built in 2016 on the grounds of the church. It is the only community garden in the city of Orlando on private property.

Lancaster House Gets Positive Support in Belle Isle Council Vote!

The fate of the historic Lancaster House has been in the balance for nearly five years. Lancaster House sits on the corner of City of Belle Isle property that Cornerstone Academy leases. School board officials want to remove the house so that they may increase the property for non-specific use. The challenge to save the house has been going on for nearly 5 years.

During the recent Belle Isle City Council meeting at the beginning of March, Belle Isle City council, with the exception of one council member, voted to appropriate money to save and move the structure to a nearby location.

This could not have happened without the continued efforts by local elected officials, preservation groups and the public’s support. Students at Cornerstone Academy as well as residents and visitors to Belle Isle will be guaranteed a historic resource that will celebrate and educate what makes this community so special.

Historic Orlando House Threatened

By Tana Mosier Porter

One of Orlando’s oldest and most elegant houses meets nearly all eligibility criteria for both the National Register of Historic Places and the list of Orlando Historic Landmarks, yet the S. A. Robinson house, built in 1885 on the east side of North Magnolia Avenue near Livingston Street, appears on neither one. With no protection from demolition, which would come with recognition as an Orlando Historic Landmark, the magnificent house is now endangered by encroaching modern development.

Samuel Austin Robinson, one of the city’s earliest residents, came to Orlando from Michigan in 1876 to help his brother set out a citrus grove in what is now Lake Eola Heights. Sam Robinson soon distinguished himself as one of Orlando’s most illustrious citizens. A civil engineer, he established a surveying practice in Central Florida and worked for seventeen years as Orange County’s surveyor. He also served as tax assessor and tax collector, alderman, school trustee, and city surveyor, in addition to two terms in the state Legislature. Robinson laid out Orlando’s downtown streets, and with J. Otto Fries, he surveyed the new Greenwood Cemetery.

“One of the best in Orlando”

In 1885 Sam Robinson built one of the first houses in the Lake Eola Heights area. The Orange County Reporterannounced in December 1884 that Robinson would soon start construction of his house, noting that he would “have one of the best and most substantial houses in Orlando, having taken great pains to secure the finest grades of rare native lumber for the inside finish.”

According to Orlando historian Eve Bacon, Sam Robinson’s large Colonial-style frame residence “featured a gable and widow’s walk. It had famous plate-glass windows that puzzled the town because of their near invisibility. The only running water in the home was through a hose in the bathroom off the ground-floor master bedroom, which connected to the faucet on the back porch. At the time, its installation was considered almost grotesque modernity on the part of Mr. Robinson. Following a November 1890 fire at the “magnificent residence of S. A. Robinson, at Orlando,” the Pensacola News Sun confirmed that, “It was finished throughout on the inside with the finest of curly yellow pine.” The house was reportedly insured for $10,000.

Robinson obviously reconstructed whatever damage the fire had done, for the house today features the same widow’s walk, which he said he had built for stargazing with his daughters, and most probably the same footprint. The front façade, though, was changed at some time, possibly after the fire. An early, undated photograph shows the house with what appears to be the same front portico roof, covering at that time verandahs across the fronts of both stories, where now the roof is supported by four elegant columns, with a small balcony above the front door.

A colonial atmosphere

Sam Robinson sold the house in 1900. In 1920, T. C. Brannon, a citrus inspector, conductor on the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, realtor, and prominent Orlandoan, bought it and opened a boarding house, advertised as “The Magnolia.” The Broadway United Methodist Church was organized at a meeting in the house in 1922. Renamed “The Colonial,” it continued as a boarding house after Brannon sold it in 1934. In 1936, the Colonial Tea Room advertised in the Winter Park Topics: lunches, dinners, special parties, and rooms by the day or the week. The Orlando Sentinel society column praised the colonial atmosphere, furnishings, and architecture, and noted “the particular charm” of the house. A new owner in 1948 planned to open a twelve-room tourist hotel to be called “Magnolia Manor.” Offices and other agencies occupied the Robinson House after W. O. Daley bought it in 1954. The Daley family sold the house in 2015, and it is again listed for sale.

Today, Sam Robinson’s substantial residence, which fronted a vast orange grove in 1885, has become an imposing four-columned mansion on a heavily traveled downtown street. The oak trees that Robinson planted are all gone in this section of Magnolia Avenue, and many Orlandoans who pass every day have perhaps never noticed the beautiful and historically important house at 419 North Magnolia Avenue.

Historian Tana Mosier Porter is based in Orlando.

Orlando Land Trust Seeks to Preserve Lake Eola Park Greenspace

Southwest Corner of Rosalind Ave and Central Blvd Orlando,FL

Orlando is fortunate to have great world class public gathering places, often referred to as “venues”, The Dr. Phillips Center, The Amway Arena and the Camping World Stadium. Both public and private money goes into these facilities to support and promote them. In reality, there are 4 venues, the fourth being the regional Lake Eola Park. Unlike the “big 3”, Lake Eola Park has a far smaller budget. Ironically it is open every day, longer hours, hosts as many if not more than some of the other venues and most definitely handles more visitors annually than some of the other venues. Lake Eola Park is historically the most attended public space in the region. Sadly, the success of the park has put economic pressure on surrounding land by developers who want to capitalize on its success.

 Many of you may recall the last attempt by developers to build a high rise on the east side of Lake Eola Park and the resulting resistance from the community. This activism is telling of how the Orlando region feels about the importance of Lake Eola Park. Public action resulted in the City of Orlando’s purchase and greenspace restoration of the east side of Lake Eola Park. However, recently there has been an attempt by out of state developers to encroach into the park on the southwest corner with a high rise tower.

 Several months ago a few women approached Orange Preservation Trust, OPT,  with the idea of preserving available greenspace around Lake Eola Park. While most people think of historic preservation as the built environment it also includes park space and landscapes. OPT agreed that their idea of restoring property to its historic greenspace state is definitely in line with the goals of preservation.

 Impressively, Lynn Long and Eugenia Sefcik founded Orlando Land Trust in a matter of months. Being Orlando natives from several generations back motivated a group of supporters to join the board of Orlando Land Trust upon their request. What is interesting of the composition of their board is that it not only includes old Orlando families but “newcomers” as well. The National Trust for Public Land will act as the local land trust’s agent and facilitate the $3.5 million transaction until their non-profit status is completed. What follows will be the fund raising to complete the sale and then deed transfer to the City of Orlando.

 What can you do to help you might ask? Check out their website, watch for upcoming events, become a volunteer and most importantly be come a donor!  Share their web page with your local as well as out of state Orlandoans who share the passion to grow back Lake Eola Park. Go to www.orlandolandtrust.org

 Let’s join these “little old ladies” and show them and civic leaders that Orlando is with them!

Black Bottom House of Prayer

Black Bottom House of Prayer

921 Bentley Street

            “The individual and collective memory of the African-American community is rooted in its churches,” declared Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in 1996, when he added all of the black churches of the South to the Trust’s annual list of most-endangered places. 

Many of Orlando’s historic black churches had disappeared or fallen into disrepair by 1996, as diminishing congregations disbanded, and others relocated to new African American communities made possible by integration, leaving behind the structures they worked so hard to build.  New congregations moved into some of the abandoned churches, and some congregations stayed, struggling to maintain their aging edifices. The old buildings hold memories for their former parishioners and for the community as a whole, and their survival provides an important connection with the past.  From baptisms, weddings, and funerals, to the Civil Rights Movement, the churches centered African American life.

The church at the corner of Westmoreland Drive and Bentley Street has stood for nearly a century in what was once “Black Bottom,” part of the African American neighborhood of Parramore.  Its first congregation, the Pleasant Hill Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, originated in 1916, when three families left the Community Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in the African American community of Jonestown, on Orlando’s east side, and organized Pleasant Hill in Black Bottom, west of the city.  They first met under a tree at the corner of Reel and West Washington Streets, now Westmoreland Drive and Polk Streets, and endeavored through most of the 1920s to build the lovely old church at 921 Bentley Street. 

In 1920, the congregation borrowed money from Moses and Ethylene Overstreet to purchase property for a church, and that same year they bought a site on West Washington or Veach Street.  From about 1921 until 1925, the Pleasant Hill CME congregation occupied a small frame building with no heat or lights at 1000 West Washington Street, now 1202 Polk Street.

In 1923, Pleasant Hill paid Moses Overstreet $225 for property at 921 Bentley Street, in the Overstreets’ Sunset Subdivision, Lot 7, Block B.  That same year they took out a building permit for a one-story church to cost $4,500.  In 1924 they borrowed $110 from charter member, Mamie Moore, which they repaid the following year.  Also in 1925, the church sold the property on West Washington Street and entered into a stock agreement with the Orange County Building and Loan Association, agreeing to purchase thirty shares of stock at $100 a share, for a total of $3000. 

During 1926 and 1927, the Pleasant Hill choir held several popular concerts and entertainments for whites and blacks, asking for a freewill offering to help raise the remaining $3000 needed to complete construction of the church.  They laid the church cornerstone in 1927, after four years of planning and three years of construction.  The congregation pushed forward with the building as finances permitted, and one member recalled the women of the church holding lanterns for the men working on the church construction in the dark after their day’s work on their regular jobs.  They expected the completed church to represent an investment of approximately $29,000.

The Pleasant Hill CME congregation changed its name to Carter Tabernacle Colored Methodist Church in 1927, to honor CME Bishop Randall Albert Carter.  In 1928 they took out a $500 building permit to complete the church, and the Carter Tabernacle congregation moved into its new sanctuary at 921 Bentley Street.  By 1935 the congregation numbered about three hundred, and in 1945 the church added a Sunday School Annex.

The Pleasant Hill/Carter Tabernacle congregation organized and built their church during an especially difficult time, as racial segregation became more institutionalized and increasingly oppressive.  Restricted in almost every way, African Americans found safety in the separate world they created.  The communities they built, complete with their own schools, churches, businesses, and associations, made their survival possible and fostered the development of a distinct African American culture.  The leadership came from the churches and the community itself, rather than from politicians.  By the mid-1950s, the Negro Chamber of Commerce found more than fifteen churches in the black community.

Suggesting changes to come, the national CME denomination replaced the word “colored,” in 1954, changing its name to become the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.  The churches continued their role of extended family during the Civil Rights movement.  By 1960 the young activists vowed that it would be “this generation or never,” and the powerful leaders in the black community, the ministers, physicians, and businessmen stood behind them.  Carter Tabernacle members marched, some joined “sit-ins” at lunch counters, and many achieved “firsts” for the African American community in employment and the professions. The steadying influence of churches and families kept Parramore calm through the demonstrations and sit-ins.  Prayer meetings and planning sessions took place in the churches.

Integration brought a mixed blessing, and in 1976, as government buildings and sports venues encroached on the black neighborhood, the Carter Tabernacle congregation left Parramore for a new church in Washington Shores. Mindful of their past in Black Bottom, the  congregation published a history of the then-ninety-year-old church in 2006.

A new congregation found a home in the old Carter Tabernacle in 2014, and in respect to the building’s past, they gave it the name Black Bottom House of Prayer.  Once again, the old church will act as extended family for those in need of assistance or just a steadying influence.

Tana Mosier Porter   2019

EJI Lynching Marker Unveiling

About the guest speaker

https://eji.org/bryan-stevenson

Villa Formosa

“Villa Formosa”

802 North Lake Formosa Drive

On February 27, 1929, the Orlando Evening Star announced that Miss Mary Morse and Miss Margaret Collard, recently of Argentina, had purchased property in Loch Haven, where they planned to build a Spanish home.  They paid cash for two lots to the west of the “super artistic typically Mediterranean home now in the course of construction by Miss Matilda A. Fraser.”  It is not certain that their house ever materialized, but Miss Fraser’s elegant mansion, designed by the Orlando architectural firm, Ryan and Roberts, remains one of the city’s finer examples of the Mediterranean Revival style of architecture popular during the 1920s Florida Land Boom.

Matilda Alexandra Fraser, born in Canada in 1865, immigrated to the United States with her family in 1866, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.  She studied at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1894-1895, and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about 1896.  She retired in 1927 after a thirty-year teaching career in the mathematics department at the highly-regarded Girls Latin School in Boston, Massachusetts, the first college preparatory school for girls in the United States. 

From the beginning of her teaching career Fraser, who preferred to be called Alexandra, took an active role in educational organizations, publishing studies and serving on committees.  In 1917 she argued for pay equity for women.  She served as an officer in the Women’s School Voter’s League in 1911, and in 1913 she joined a party of Boston suffragists on an automobile trip to Washington, D.C., to take part in a constitutional amendment demonstration on July 31.  Traveling in a car decorated with pennants and banners promoting votes for women, the group stopped for suffrage meetings along the way.  

Fraser, whose Scottish-born father, may have been an architect in Cleveland, Ohio, could well have known architect Ida Annah Ryan in Boston.  Fraser was eight years older and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology several years before Ryan, who graduated in 1907, but both were members of the Cleophan women’s social club at M. I. T., and, as single,  professional women, both supported feminist causes.  Ryan already worked in Orlando when Fraser retired in Boston and bought her building site on Orlando’s Lake Formosa.

Architect Ida Annah Ryan, the first woman to graduate with a Master of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won a scholarship in 1907, another first for a woman, that enabled her to study architecture in Europe.  She spent most of her time in Spain and Italy.  Ryan established the first women’s architectural practice in Waltham, Massachusetts, designing structures in New England and in Central Florida, but the Massachusetts chapter of the American Institute of Architects refused to accept her because she was a woman. 

Ryan moved to Orlando when the construction industry slowed during World War I, becoming Orlando’s first woman architect, and in 1921, the eighth woman to become a member of the American Institute of Architects.  She worked with F. H. Trimble in 1918-1919, and in the 1920s, as the Florida Land Boom created a need for more construction in Orlando, Ryan joined with Isabel Roberts, a former associate of Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago, to open a new firm, “Ryan and Roberts.” 

They joined a group of architects in Orlando who sought to create a distinctive Florida architectural style, one especially suited to the Central Florida climate.  The Mediterranean Revival style, with its low pitched roofs and wide eaves, built of more durable stone and clay tile, met the need and became popular in 1920s Orlando.

M. Alexandra Fraser bought three lots in the new Loch Haven Subdivision on Orlando’s Lake Formosa.  In 1928, she took out a building permit for a residence to cost $21,700.  She hired the architectural firm of Ryan and Roberts to design the house, and C. & O. Construction to build it.  When the 1926 subdivision was replatted in 1930, her property became lot 3 of block 9.   

Fraser chose an elegant setting for her home.  Developers of the Loch Haven Subdivision advertised a “secluded retreat” and a “vista of green, wooded slopes” set among three lakes.  They promised paving, sidewalks, sewers, water and gas mains, and underground lighting and telephone systems.  The home sites featured orange trees remaining from the Charles Jacocks grove, famous for its pecans and oranges from 1879 until 1915, when Jacocks’s widow sold the forty-four acre property, for $50,000.  The grove continued as a mail-order business until 1923.  The Loch Haven Company bought it in 1926 for a residential development.

 Ryan and Roberts designed a Mediterranean Revival masterpiece for Alexandra Fraser, with their own trademark embellishments. Built of concrete block and stucco, with a traditional red barrel tile roof, the 15-room mansion features the architects’ signature window shapes and asymmetrical arrangements for the most pleasing play of light.  Varied ceiling heights and step- downs add flavor, while Spanish tile floors, accented with Art Deco Rookwood tiles, and two sets of French doors opening to a large open porch in the back make it a charming residence.

Alexandra Fraser lived for a decade in the house she called “Villa Formosa.”  The federal census found her there in 1930, but the city directory shows nothing on the site until 1931.  In fact, for several years hers was the only house on North Lake Fprmosa Drive.  She reportedly lived alone, though she employed a cook who shared the house.  The 1940 census report has her widowed sister, Belle Smith, living in the house with her, along with two other women. 

A member of the Sorosis Club and the American Association of University Women, Fraser took an active interest in Girl Scouting in Orlando, playing an important part in the establishment of the Girl Scouts’ Little House. She entertained frequently, giving teas and luncheons for friends, and regularly hosting meetings of the A. A. U. W., beginning with an elegant Christmas tea in December 1930. She followed that with a large reception for Boston friends on New Year’s Day 1931. 

House guests from Boston and family from Cleveland visited each winter.  Among her Boston guests were Lucy Wheelock, pioneer in the American kindergarten movement, and well-known organist and Unitarian clergyman, Eugene Rodman Shippen, who became a resident of Winter Park. Mary E. Dow, the sister of the Dow Chemical Company founder, probably a childhood friend from Cleveland, visited from Saginaw, Michigan. Margaret Collard and Mary Morse, who had hoped to become her neighbors, came to Villa Formosa from Orange City, where they settled instead.  They later returned to Argentina, where they both died in 1945.  

Matilda Alexandra Fraser died on April 30, 1940.   She left an estate of $185,905, including her house, appraised at $13,000. She valued her home enough to make special provisions for it in her will, requesting that the house be offered for sale for two-thirds of its appraised value to three people, in the sequence that she named them.  The first person, a relative, declined the offer, but the second, Raymond D. Robinson, bought the house for $9,310.70.  He lived at Villa Formosa for six years, before selling it in 1946.               

Like so many ambitious developments in the 1920s, the Loch Haven Subdivision fell victim to the Great Depression of the 1930s.  The city foreclosed in 1931, taking possession of the failed development, by then with liens of nearly $100,000 for paving and sewer assessments.  Plans called for a world’s fair, called “Florida on Parade,” to be built on the site of the Loch Haven Subdivision, but that, too, failed in 1936.  The city eventually offered some of the properties for sale and created a city park on others.  Villa Formosa now faces Loch Haven Park and the Mennello Museum of American Art, with Lake Formosa at its backyard. 

When the City of Orlando foreclosed in 1931, it took possession of all of the Loch Haven development except Fraser’s property, and the Florida on Parade failure possibly spared her a fight to keep her beloved mansion. In 2008-2009, the city again attempted to acquire the house, this time to be demolished to create green space around Florida Hospital.  Four houses were bought and destroyed, but with a recession coming, the Villa Formosa offer was withdrawn.  It would appear that economic downturns have twice saved the irreplaceable mansion, an outstanding example of Mediterranean Revival architecture and one of only two remaining Ryan and Roberts-designed houses in Orlando.

Tana Porter

2019