“Only in a real city will you find, in an art museum, a painting with a title like this: “In the beginning there was borscht, and then came the thought of liver.” Done partly in beet juice.
Here are some of the joys of this city—downtown and in the neighborhoods—that are particularly suited for grown-ups and particularly for grown-ups weary of being blocked by convoys of baby-strollers from getting to, say, Universal’s incomparable “Spider-Man” thrill ride.
Loch Haven Park
Not only a park (and a loch), but home to a bevy of cultural and educational venues, including the Orlando Science Center, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando Repertory Theatre and the Mennello Museum of American Art.
The Science Center is your basic kids museum, so skip that, unless you absolutely must see a dinosaur, need to press buttons or are one of the eight people left in American who hasn’t experienced some variation of “Titanic: The Experience.” The Rep’s rep is primarily “family” shows (”You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” “Go, Dog! Go!”), not that there’s anything wrong with that.
It’s the Big Art Museum that’s the star here. As with many regional museums, the collection isn’t vast—but unlike the others, what’s here is very, very good. Its O’Keeffe (”Datura and Pedernal”) is quintessential Georgia (flower, New Mexico); also here is fine work by John Singer Sargent and landscapists Thomas Moran and Herman Herzog. You just missed a delightful exhibition justly called “Audacity in Art”—the “borscht” work, by a Vietnamese artist, was a highlight—but there’s a Rockwell show on through Memorial Day. Also, an excellent “Ancient Americas” collection, if you’re into that—and, of course, a Chihuly. Not talking the MoMA here, but better than you’d imagine . . .
Orange County Regional History Center
Look for the statue of the guy wrangling an alligator in the heart of downtown, and you’ll find this museum beside him, fashioned from the former county courthouse. Among the exhibits is a series of photos of a sinkhole that almost swallowed Winter Park in 1981 (and, of course, became a major tourist attraction for a while), much information on the local Seminoles (the real ones, not Bobby Bowden’s Florida State teams), and chilling material on the African-American experience in the area. (The Groveland story will leave you shaking your head.)
Also intriguing: a courtroom, left whole.
“The Bundy trial was here,” said the center’s Sherry Lewis. “We can’t give eye-witness confirmation that he was the one who carved his name into the desk, but . . . ”
In 1980, Ted Bundy was convicted here in the 1978 rape-murder of a 12-year-old Florida girl, Kimberly Leach. She would be his 29th, and last, victim.
Someone left a carving.
Winter Park
The train carrying the cold and wealthy from up north stopped here in winter, they built grand houses, and there you are. The in-town suburb is home to Rollins College, cute restaurants (some open for lunch, with sidewalk seating), the Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art (which, befitting a museum with a name that long, gets its own section later in this essay) and, of course, the Scenic Boat Tour.
The Scenic Boat Tour has been plying the mossy-tree- and mansion-lined lakes and canals of Winter Park since the Great Depression. It’s evidently an “essential” for visitors here, at least in part because it beats walking around in the heat—but the vegetation is lush, the narration is amusing, the price is right ($10, $5 for kids, who will be bored 10 minutes into it) and what better way to see, on the same tour, homes lived in by the likes of Mamie Eisenhower and Horace Grant?”
(via chicagotribune.com )
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