Loch Haven Cultural Park: Orlando’s 45-Acre Front Yard of Art and Science
The Orlando Museum of Art, the Science Center, the Mennello, Orlando Shakes and more share one walkable, lake-ringed campus at Ivanhoe Village's eastern edge. How to work it.
3 minute read
Forty-five acres, three lakes, and a density of culture that would flatter a city five times Orlando’s size: Loch Haven Cultural Park, at 777 E. Princeton St., is officially part of Ivanhoe Village and functions as its eastern anchor — the place where the district’s vintage, low-rise charm meets the city’s flagship institutions. The Orlando Museum of Art, the Orlando Science Center, the Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando Shakes, the Orlando Fire Museum, Orlando Family Stage and Orlando Ballet all share one tree-shaded, walkable campus. You do not visit Loch Haven for one thing. You visit it the way you visit a small college town: pick your faculty and wander.
The art anchor: Orlando Museum of Art
Founded in 1924, the Orlando Museum of Art is the campus’s senior institution — an 80,000-square-foot museum showing local, regional, national and international work, with permanent collections spanning American art from the 18th century to 1945, art of the Ancient Americas and African art, plus a rotating slate of contemporary exhibitions. Give it ninety minutes to two hours. It is the grown-up of the park: quiet galleries, serious curation, and the kind of special exhibitions that give locals a reason to return four times a year.
The loud one: Orlando Science Center
Across the green, the Orlando Science Center does everything at higher volume. Four floors of hands-on STEM exhibits — DinoDigs for the fossil-obsessed, KidsTown for the small, kinetic and climate zones for everyone between — plus giant-screen films in the Dr. Phillips CineDome and stargazing through the Crosby Observatory. The Science Center has been inspiring curiosity for more than 60 years, and it remains the single best rainy-day answer in Orlando for families; our tourism guide covers it in depth at the Orlando Science Center page. Budget two to three hours, more with children, and accept that you will not see all of it.
The jewel and the stage
The campus’s intimate masterpiece is the Mennello Museum of American Art, the former Howard Phillips home holding the world’s largest Earl Cunningham collection under a 350-year-old oak. And when evening comes, Orlando Shakes — the Orlando Shakespeare Theater, in partnership with the University of Central Florida — carries the park after dark, mixing the Bard with bold musicals and new plays. Add the Orlando Fire Museum’s vintage apparatus and Orlando Family Stage’s programming for young audiences, and the park genuinely covers every age and temperament in a single party.
The green between the buildings
It would be a mistake to treat the park itself as mere connective tissue. Loch Haven’s 45 acres sit between Lake Estelle, Lake Rowena and Lake Formosa, shaded by historic live oaks — including the centuries-old giant known as “The Mayor” by the Mennello’s sculpture garden — and laced with paved paths and outdoor sculpture. Families picnic on the lawns between institutions; the Fire Museum’s volunteers polish brass; wedding parties photograph under the oaks. The grounds are free and open daily, which makes the park a legitimate destination even on a day when you enter no building at all — a cultural campus that doubles as one of the prettiest public greens in the city.
How to work the park
The institutions are connected by paved paths through lawns and sculpture gardens, with the lakes — Estelle, Rowena and Formosa — doing the landscaping. The local’s pattern: one museum in the morning, lunch back on Virginia Drive (the whole Ivanhoe dining bench is minutes away), a second institution or a Shakes matinee in the afternoon, and the sculpture garden under the oaks whenever you need air. The Orlando Urban Trail links the park to downtown for cyclists. However you sequence it, Loch Haven is the proof that Ivanhoe Village is not just a pretty dining district — it is Orlando’s cultural front yard, and it has been since long before the theme parks.
Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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