College Park, Properly: Lakes, Brick Streets and One Very Good Drive
Streets named for colleges, a chain of small lakes and one independent main street — a local's guide to doing Orlando's most walkable neighborhood well.
3 minute read
Most Orlando neighborhoods announce themselves. College Park just gets on with it. A few minutes northwest of downtown, this is a residential district that was platted in the 1920s, named its streets for American colleges and universities — Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and their peers — and then built itself around a chain of small lakes and one long commercial street. That street is Edgewater Drive, and if you understand Edgewater Drive, you understand College Park.
Start with the geography, because locals navigate by water. Lake Ivanhoe anchors the neighborhood’s southern and eastern edge, big enough for kayakers and paddleboarders and edged by a park and paths. Lake Adair sits closer to the middle, a smaller lake with a brick loop that fills with walkers every morning. Lake Concord and Lake Silver thread through the residential streets to the north and east. Two parts of the neighborhood — around Lake Adair and Lake Concord, and around Lake Ivanhoe — are designated historic districts, which is why so many blocks still read as 1920s Florida: bungalows, brick streets, and oak canopy instead of stucco sprawl.
The Drive is the living room
Edgewater Drive runs the length of the neighborhood as its main street, and nearly everything social happens on or just off it. This is not a mall corridor. The storefronts are independent in the stubborn, specific way that only survives when a neighborhood actually shops at them: a diner decorated with salt and pepper shakers, an organic teahouse that has been pouring since 2004, a leather studio where the goods are made in the back, boutiques that have dressed the same families for decades. Albert Park, a small landscaped park with a pavilion and stage right on the Drive, functions as the corridor’s front porch — and as a gathering point when the neighborhood throws a party.
The party, most years, is College Park JazzFest, when Edgewater Drive closes to traffic and three stages take over the street. But you do not need a festival to feel the rhythm here. On an ordinary weeknight the Drive hums at a lower, better frequency: patios full, dogs in tow, people who clearly walked from two streets away.
A morning in College Park, done right
Begin at the lake. The loop at Lake Adair is the neighborhood’s unofficial morning meeting place — runners, strollers, and people conducting serious business with coffee in hand. From there, Edgewater Drive handles breakfast in several dialects: the full diner treatment at Shakers American Café or Christo’s, or the quieter, leaf-by-leaf approach at Infusion Tea. Our breakfast guide sorts the options.
Midday belongs to the Drive’s shops and to Dubsdread. The city-owned golf course at the neighborhood’s northern end has been part of College Park since 1924 — it is one of Central Florida’s oldest public layouts — and its clubhouse restaurant, The Tap Room at Dubsdread, is as much a neighborhood institution as a golfer’s lunch. You do not need a tee time to eat there, and plenty of the verandah never touches a club.
The literary footnote
College Park’s most famous address is one you can only look at from the sidewalk. At 1418 Clouser Avenue stands the small frame house where Jack Kerouac lived in 1957 and 1958, finished his edits on On the Road and wrote The Dharma Bums. The house, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, is not open to the public — it houses writers in residence through the Kerouac Project of Orlando — but the historical marker out front makes it a worthwhile, respectful detour for anyone who cares about American letters. It is the most College Park fact imaginable: a landmark hiding in plain sight on a quiet residential street, unmarked by any gift shop.
How to use this guide
Everything in our College Park coverage starts from the College Park hub, and every place we recommend is pinned on the Orlando Top Spots Map. Eat through the neighborhood with Where to Eat in College Park, plan an evening with our date-night route, and browse the Drive with our shopping guide. College Park rewards the unhurried — come on foot, stay longer than you planned, and let the lakes set the pace.
Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.
Orlando Citizen by email
The weekly edition, in your inbox
One email, every Saturday: the week’s edition of Orlando Citizen — the week’s stories, rankings and winners, gathered in one place. Free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Related Stories
Editor’s Picks
Spotted an error? Tell us — corrections · How we rank