Avalon Park, Done Properly: Inside Orlando’s Town That Built Itself a Downtown
A Swiss banker's pasture became a walkable town with its own clock tower, lake and food hall — how to do Avalon Park well, from first coffee to last stroll around the lake.
3 minute read
Most Orlando neighborhoods are something you drive through. Avalon Park is something you arrive in — and the difference was deliberate. In 1998, on 1,860 acres of former pasture east of Alafaya Trail and south of State Road 50, Avalon Park Group — founded in 1995 by Swiss investment banker Beat Kahli — began building not a subdivision but a town, on New Urbanist principles: a real center you can walk to, homes and shops and schools mixed close together, front porches near the sidewalk and rear alleys behind the houses. Two decades on, the experiment is the far east side’s most complete answer to the question of what a suburb could be instead.
Start where the town started
The downtown came first as a statement. The Clock Tower at Avalon Park went up in 2000, standing over not much yet; the first downtown block, Downtown I, followed in 2002, and Downtown II in 2005. Along Avalon Park Boulevard the formula holds today: apartments over storefronts, traditional architecture at a human scale, and — by the developer’s count — more than 150 shops, restaurants and services in the downtown directory. At the center sits Avalon Lake, the man-made lake fronted by mixed-use buildings and the town fountain. Locals treat it the way the plan intended: as the front yard. Start any visit with a loop of the lake and a coffee, and the town explains itself.
The working town underneath
What separates Avalon Park from a lifestyle center with houses attached is the unglamorous completeness. Villages of single-family homes, townhomes and condos ring the center. Avalon Elementary and Avalon Middle sit inside the community, and Timber Creek High School is the zoned high school — there are now residents who were born here, schooled here and work here, which is the developer’s favorite proof of concept. The sales line was always “live, learn, work and play,” and unusually for a sales line, it was meant literally.
How to spend a day
Morning belongs to the trails and the cafés: the community’s roughly 16 miles of off-street paths run beside the main roads and through the neighborhoods, and a short loop circles Founders Square and the lake. Breakfast at a downtown café, then browse the boulevard’s storefronts before lunch at the Marketplace at Avalon Park, the food hall at 3801 Avalon Park East Boulevard that has become downtown’s living room. Afternoon is for Town Park and Tanja King Park if you have kids in tow, and the evening move is simple: dinner at one of the sit-down rooms on or near the boulevard, then a drink at Bowigens inside the Marketplace and a final lap of the lake as the fountain lights up.
What to know before you go
Avalon Park is in unincorporated Orange County, well east of downtown Orlando — this is a destination for east-siders and a deliberate trip for everyone else, not a stop on the way to somewhere. Parking is easy by Orlando standards and the whole downtown is genuinely walkable once you arrive, which is rather the point. Festivals take over Town Park through the year, so check the community calendar before a weekend visit; a festival day is the town at its best and its busiest. Our Avalon Park hub tracks what’s new, and the Orlando Top Spots Map places Avalon Park against the rest of the city.
The honest caveats
A field guide should say what a place is not. Avalon Park is not historic — everything here is younger than some of its residents’ cars, and the traditional architecture is a deliberate costume, however well tailored. It is not urban in the downtown-Orlando sense: the density is gentle, the center is a few blocks, and the town still depends on the car for anything beyond its own borders. And it is not finished being argued about; New Urbanism has critics who find the formula mannered, and a drive down the boulevard will let you form your own view in about four minutes. What is harder to argue with is the usage. The lake loop is walked, the food hall is full, the festivals draw thousands, and the schools are full of second-generation Avalon Park kids. A plan is a hypothesis. Twenty-five years of evenings like the ones described above is the experiment’s result, and on the evidence of a Friday night downtown, the hypothesis is holding.
Best for: east Orlando residents showing visitors that the suburbs can have a center, families who want a whole afternoon in one walkable place, and anyone curious what New Urbanism looks like when it is old enough to have grown up.
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