The Best Things to Do in College Park: Golf, Kerouac and Lakeside Loops
Play a 1924 golf course, stand outside the house where Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums, and walk the lakes — a day in College Park, no turnstiles required.
3 minute read
College Park is not a neighborhood with attractions in the Orlando sense — no gates, no turnstiles, no parking trams. Its things to do are the things its residents do: play a hundred-year-old golf course, walk the lakes, look in on a Beat Generation landmark, and spend time on a main street that still works as one. That is precisely the appeal. Here is how to fill a day in College Park without once hearing a ride announcement.
Play Dubsdread, the 1924 original
Dubsdread Golf Course is the neighborhood’s headline act and one of Central Florida’s genuine sporting landmarks. Opened on December 7, 1924, designed by Thomas Bendelow, it is the region’s oldest public layout — a par-70 course of narrow fairways and small, heavily bunkered greens that hosted the Orlando Open in the 1940s and welcomed Sam Snead, Ben Hogan and Babe Zaharias. The City of Orlando has owned it since 1978 and renovated it thoroughly in 2008, so history here comes with modern conditioning. The name, local lore says, comes from the dread it inspired in “dubs” — novice golfers. Book a round, or skip the golf entirely and take lunch on the verandah at The Tap Room at Dubsdread, one of the best non-golf golf experiences in the city.
Stand outside the Kerouac House
At 1418 Clouser Avenue, a modest one-story frame house under a huge oak holds one of American literature’s better footnotes. Jack Kerouac lived here in 1957 and 1958, finished editing On the Road, and wrote The Dharma Bums in a burst of days and nights. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 and now hosts writers in residence through the Kerouac Project of Orlando — which means it is not open to the public, and the correct visit is a respectful one from the sidewalk: read the historical marker, look at the little house, and marvel that a defining voice of postwar America did some of his defining work on this quiet College Park street. It pairs naturally with a walk through the surrounding blocks, some of the prettiest residential Orlando there is.
Do the lakes
College Park’s parks are lakeside and lived-in. Lake Adair’s brick loop is the neighborhood’s walking circuit, ringed by the Lake Adair–Lake Concord Historic District’s houses. Lake Ivanhoe, the big water at the neighborhood’s edge, has a city park on its shore (57 S Ivanhoe Blvd) used for fishing, kayaking and paddleboarding, with paths along the cypress-dotted shore. Albert Park, right on Edgewater Drive at 2400 Edgewater, is the corridor’s green front room — pavilion, stage, picnic space — and Dartmouth Park serves the residential streets with playground and open lawn. None of this requires a ticket, a plan or a crowd strategy.
And the street itself
Budget an hour for Edgewater Drive between meals: boutiques and a working leather studio (see our shopping guide), a teahouse, diners, and the general pleasure of a main street at human scale. If your visit lands in May, know that Loch Haven Park — on the neighborhood’s eastern edge, just across Lake Ivanhoe — holds the Orlando Museum of Art, the Orlando Science Center and the Orlando Fringe festival grounds; locals treat it as College Park’s cultural backyard, and it is an easy extension of a College Park day. Everything above is pinned on the Orlando Top Spots Map; start from the College Park hub and let the lakes set the route.
One more resident’s tip: time a visit for a neighborhood event day. Between JazzFest in the fall, Holiday on the Drive in December and the recurring street tastings The Drive organizes, College Park periodically closes its main street and shows you the version of itself its residents love most. The attractions above are open all year; the neighborhood’s personality is on fullest display when the Drive belongs to pedestrians.
Photo: Visitor7, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.
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