Casselberry, Explained: Ferns, Lakes and an Art Campus Behind City Hall
Thirty lakes, seventeen parks, a sculpture garden around City Hall and a ranked brewery on SR 436: how Casselberry — Seminole County's fern-born crossroads city — actually works, and how to do it well.
3 minute read
Most Orlando-area cities announce themselves. Casselberry does the opposite. It sits at the crossroads of SR 436 and US 17-92 in Seminole County, looking at first glance like pure corridor — plazas, traffic, the working machinery of suburban life. Then you turn off the main roads and the city changes character completely: lake after lake, oak-shaded streets, ranch homes on the water, and a civic center that is not a building complex so much as a nine-acre park. Our Casselberry hub starts from that surprise, because it is the key to the whole place.
A city built by ferns
Casselberry began as fern country. Before Seminole County existed, the area was the Concord Settlement. In the 1920s Gordon J. Barnett developed Fern Park Estates and built a business growing asparagus plumosus ferns — the feathery greenery florists used in arrangements, shipped across the United States and Canada. Hibbard Casselberry arrived from the Chicago area in 1926, worked selling Fern Park Estates lots, then struck out on his own with the Winter Park Fern Company, buying land around the Triplet Chain of Lakes and selling northern buyers a house lot paired with a small fernery or grove.
The rivalry turned political. When Barnett backed a Fern Park charter with taxing power, Casselberry countered with a tax-free alternative, and on October 10, 1940, voters incorporated the Town of Casselberry with Hibbard as its first mayor. When the Second World War made ferns non-essential, his operations pivoted to war work — bandoliers, bomb parachutes and hospital tent liners. A new charter created the City of Casselberry in 1965, and the fern sheds gave way to the lake neighborhoods that define the city now. The oldest surviving building, the Hooker Homestead, dates to 1887 — a reminder that settlement here predates the fern boom by decades.
The lakes run the place
Casselberry packs more than thirty lakes and ponds into roughly eight square miles, and the city’s seventeen parks mostly exist to get you to the water. The centerpiece is Lake Concord Park, nine acres wrapped around City Hall at 95 Triplet Lake Drive, with a sculpture garden, boardwalk, amphitheater and fountains. A few minutes away, Secret Lake Park spreads across three interconnected lakes with a recreation center, courts and fishing and boating access. Wirz Park, the big recreation park near Red Bug Lake Road, anchors the south side with its renovated pool and fields. The five-mile Casselberry Greenway Trail stitches four parks and two schools together for walkers and cyclists.
An art campus where City Hall should be
The most distinctive thing Casselberry has done is put culture in the civic center. In Lake Concord Park you will find the Casselberry Art House — a 2,500-square-foot gallery and classroom facility working since 2002 — the Casselberry Sculpture House, dedicated to three-dimensional and installation work, and the newer Casselberry Arts Center, a 3,000-square-foot contemporary gallery with free admission. Add the sculpture garden, quarterly exhibits inside City Hall and the illuminated iLLuminart sculpture event, and a city of this size is running an arts program that punches well above its weight. We profile the campus in our guide to Casselberry’s art houses.
Eating and drinking on the corridors
Casselberry’s food scene lives on its two corridors and rewards anyone willing to look past the plaza signage. On SR 436, Bowigens Beer Company — No. 6 in our Orlando craft brewery rankings with a Net Score of 91.5 — pours from an expanded taproom with its own kitchen, practically next door to Vinzo’s, the long-running New York-style Italian grill and pizzeria. WA Sushi brings omakase-level ambition to the same road, while Digino’s has reinvented itself as an Eastern European-accented brunch room. The full picture is in where to eat in Casselberry.
How to do Casselberry well
Start at Lake Concord Park in the morning, when the sculpture garden is quiet and the light is on the water. Cross to the Art House or Arts Center for whatever is on the walls, then take lunch on 436 — Italian at Vinzo’s or brunch at Digino’s. Spend the afternoon at Secret Lake Park or on the Greenway Trail, and finish at Bowigens, where the pilot brewhouse still turns out taproom-only experiments. On the second Friday of the month, the whole city seems to converge on Lake Concord Park for the food truck event, with live music on the amphitheater lawn. Plot the day on the Orlando Top Spots Map, and do not judge this city from the driver’s seat of a car on Semoran Boulevard. Casselberry is what happens when you park and walk toward the water.
Photo: Seldom4, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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