Old Florida

This afternoon, my son's girlfriend and her mom came to visit, and we went to the historic section of downtown Winter Park. It's very nice. The streets are paved with bricks and the train station sits where it has been since the town was founded (which, if the souvenir t-shirts are accurate, was in 1882). But, as is the case with many towns in Florida, the streets are lined with boutiques full of expensive merchandise and restaurants serving overpriced food. The experience made me think of other "historic" cities I've visited in Florida. St. Augustine is a good example. While many of the structures have been preserved, the shopowners come and go, most of them selling generic tourist crap. If you see something cool in a unique shop downtown, you'd better grab it; chances are the store won't be there the next time you go.

I have lived in Florida for only fifteen years, well past the inception of the "Mouse" culture. I doubt that Orlando was much different from all the other small towns and cities in Florida before Disneyworld came in, and the small local (and, I would argue, infinitely more interesting) tourist stops began to disappear. Cypress Gardens is the latest casualty. I have fond memories of the water skiing stuntmen and stuntwomen, and the women who walked the Gardens in beautiful antebellum gowns, parasols shielding them from the sun. Recently, the park was taken over not by Disneyworld, but by Legoland. You can gain entrance only if you buy a ticket to the larger park (Legoland) and, of course, that's very expensive. I suppose the point could be made that without the larger park subsuming it, Cypress Gardens would have ceased to exist altogether. I would counter that if not for the mega-parks, the smaller parks wouldn't have to fight so hard for their survival.

When I was five years old, my parents brought me and my brother to Florida. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember visiting Busch Gardens and Marineland in addition to Cypress Gardens. When I first moved here, Marineland was pretty much the same as it had been twenty-five (or so) years earlier, with penguin shows, dolphins, flamingos, and a crazy-huge Neptune statue across the street. Now the dolphins are the only animals left; you can swim with them in a "Dolphin Experience", which is not a bad thing to do, I guess. The penguins and flamingos are gone (I remember a virtual sea of pink feathers, there were so many flamingos), and a huge condo building stands across the street. I'm not sure if Neptune still stands watch -- he rose up from a patchy bed of scrub and palm (as well as broken concrete the last time I saw him) -- but if he does, he's probably even more distressed by the loss of our old state treasures than I am.