Other than building great outdoor projects, here is what we love most about Winter Park. Here are five fun facts about Winter Park:

1. The World's Largest Collection of Tiffany Glass: The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art on Park Avenue holds the world's most comprehensive collection of works by Louis Comfort Tiffany — including the reconstructed Tiffany Chapel originally created for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It is one of the most significant art collections in the United States, and it sits in the middle of a walkable downtown that most Central Florida cities have spent decades trying to replicate.

2. Built as a Winter Resort for Northern Industrialists: Winter Park was founded in the 1880s as a deliberate resort community for northern business magnates and industrialists seeking a refined Florida retreat. Its founding families — the Nickersons, the Knowleses, the Morses — built institutions, donated land, and shaped a civic culture that the city has protected for over 140 years. The brick streets, the chain of lakes, and Rollins College are all direct products of that founding vision. Few Florida cities have maintained their original character this deliberately.

3.Rollins College: Florida's Oldest Recognized College: Founded in 1885, Rollins College is the oldest recognized college in Florida and one of the most selective liberal arts colleges in the Southeast. Its lakefront campus on Virginia Avenue is consistently ranked among the most beautiful in the country — and it gives Winter Park a permanent intellectual and cultural anchor that no other Central Florida city has.

4. Park Avenue: Ranked Among the Best Shopping Streets in the U.S.: Park Avenue has been ranked repeatedly among the top outdoor shopping and dining destinations in the United States — brick sidewalks, independent boutiques, award-winning restaurants, and a canopy of live oaks that makes it genuinely pleasant to walk in a Florida city. Central Park runs alongside it, and the Saturday Farmers Market has operated continuously for decades.

5. A City of Lakes — 11 of Them: Winter Park contains 11 named lakes within or touching its boundaries, connected by a Venetian-style canal system that allows residents to travel by boat from Lake Osceola to Lake Virginia to Lake Maitland. The Winter Park Scenic Boat Tour has operated since 1938 — the longest continuously operating boat tour in the United States — and the chain of lakes is the geographic and aesthetic heart of everything that makes this address worth protecting.