2025 Historic Preservation Calendar Theme
The 2025 Historic Preservation Board calendar and photography competition will focus on Orlando’s College Park Neighborhood.
In April of 1923, the Chamber of Commerce petitioned the City Commission to expand the city’s northern boundary to Par Street thereby encompassing the developing area known as College Park into the City Limits. It was Walter Rose who first started naming streets in the area after Ivy League colleges when he platted his Rosemere Development in 1921. Other developers like CABCO (Cooper-Atha-Barr Real Estate and Mortgage Company) would carry on the naming convention believing it helped sell lots. In all, CABCO platted 9 subdivisions covering over a hundred acres with thousands of lots. The Florida Land Boom that created the foundations for College Park came to a sudden and abrupt end when the Miami Hurricane of 1926 drove away Northern buyers. Vacant lots outnumbered houses in some subdivisions until soldiers returning from World War 2 drove a second building boom.
Today, redevelopment pressures continue in this urban neighborhood not protected by local ordinances. We are in danger of losing our shared cultural heritage and College Park is in danger of losing its architectural character found in the historical styles of Colonial Revival, Craftsman, Mediterranean Revival, Minimal Traditional, Mission, Neoclassical Revival, and Tudor Revival.
For the purposes of this competition, College Park is bounded by Par Street on the North, Golfview Street on the south, S. Rio Grande to the West and Interstate 4 to the East. Please see the map for exact boundaries.
Submission subjects can be of individual details or an entire structure. Selected images may be paired in the calendar with a historic photograph for comparison.
To be eligible for the calendar, subject matter should be from structures that are at least 50 years old (generally, pre-1970) and be located within the provided College Park Boundaries. Entrants are highly encouraged to submit photographs of areas outside the Lake Adair/Lake Concord and Lake Ivanhoe Historic Districts.