Conway: Orlando’s Original Lake Country, Done Properly
Settled in the 1850s, replanted by British citrus growers and tied to town by a 1914 brick road — Conway is a lakeside suburb that predates the suburban era. How to do it well.
3 minute read
Most Orlando neighborhoods were drawn on a developer’s plat sometime after the interstate arrived. Conway was not. This unincorporated community in southeast Orlando — about 3.4 square miles of land by the 2020 Census — was settled in the 1850s, replanted in the 1880s as a British colony of citrus growers and sportsmen, and tied to town in 1914 by a brick road that was one of the first paved highways in Orange County. It is, by Orlando standards, old — and it feels it, in the best way: mature oaks, mid-century ranch houses on generous lots, and canal streets that keep ending, pleasantly, at water.
This is the Conway hub‘s home turf, and the first thing to understand is that the map here is drawn by lakes, not roads.
The water runs the place
The Conway Chain of Lakes — Lake Gatlin, the two arms of Little Lake Conway, and the north and south lobes of Lake Conway itself, roughly 1,800 acres of connected water in all — shapes Conway’s west and south edges. Canals thread inland from the chain, which is why so many ordinary-looking streets here end at a dock. Homes range from modest mid-century ranchers to genuine lakefront, and the housing stock tells the story: the median Conway home was built in the mid-1970s, and most of the neighborhood went up between 1950 and 1989. This is an established place, not a development pipeline.
You do not need a lake house to live the lake life here. Public ramps reach the chain, guides fish it year-round, and on a still morning the chain does something rare for Orlando water — it runs clear. Our full breakdown is in the boating guide and the fishing guide.
The landward half: Barber Park and the market
What the lakes are to Conway’s edges, Barber Park is to its middle. The 81-acre Orange County park at 3701 Gatlin Avenue, at the foot of Lake George, stacks up sports fields, a skate park, a covered roller hockey rink, a splash pad, playgrounds and a fenced dog park — and once a month it hosts the Conway Community Market, the neighborhood’s regular gathering of vendors, food trucks and live music. If you visit Conway exactly once, make it a market Sunday and read our Barber Park profile before you go.
Conway Road: the errand spine
Conway Road — State Road 15 — runs north–south through the middle of the community and gives it its name. The commercial life here is resolutely local and practical: a family diner, a Mexican market-restaurant, Chinese takeout, and, one street over on East Michigan Street, a family-owned Italian room, a Puerto Rican loaded-potato spot and the neighborhood pet bakery. Nobody drives across town for Conway dining, and that is rather the point — it feeds the people who live here, well. The full table is in Where to Eat in Conway.
How to do Conway well
Start early, because Conway is a morning place. Coffee and a diner breakfast on Conway Road, then the lakes while the water is glass — or Barber Park before the Florida heat makes decisions for you. Save the market for its Sunday, bring the dog (this is one of Orlando’s genuinely dog-built neighborhoods; see A Dog’s Day in Conway), and finish with pizza or tacos on Michigan Street or Conway Road.
A practical note on geography: Conway’s chain is shared with Belle Isle, the small city wrapped around Lake Conway’s western shore. Belle Isle is a separate community with its own portal on this site — its ramps and parks are Conway’s neighbors, and we label them that way rather than claiming them. Everything ranked in the area, Conway’s own and its neighbors’, is plotted on the Top Spots Map.
Conway will never be the loudest neighborhood in Orlando, and its residents would like to keep it that way. What it offers instead is rarer: a lakeside suburb that predates the suburban era, still organized around water, oaks and one very good park.
Photo: Chris Gent, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr (Openverse).
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