The Other Kissimmee: A Downtown and Lakefront Guide
Skip the corridor for a day: Broadway's dining rooms, a 50-foot monument built from stones sent by every state, and sunset over Lake Toho — the Kissimmee locals actually live in.
3 minute read
Most visitors meet Kissimmee at highway speed: the US-192 corridor, the vacation-home gates, the gift shops with the giant shells. That Kissimmee is real, but it is not the whole city. Drive a few minutes east of the corridor and the pavement gives way to Broadway — a genuine, working main street — and then, a few blocks farther, to the north shore of Lake Tohopekaliga, where Kissimmee started and where, on a good evening, it still feels like itself. This is the Kissimmee we send friends to. Our full area coverage lives on the Kissimmee hub.
Start on Broadway
Historic downtown Kissimmee runs along Broadway and the streets that feed it — Dakin Avenue, Pleasant Street, Monument Avenue. It is compact enough to walk end to end, and that is the right way to do it. Eat first: Big John’s Rockin’ BBQ, at 220 E. Monument Avenue, holds the No. 1 spot in our Best BBQ in Orlando rankings with a Net Score of 90.9 — slow-smoked brisket, ribs and pulled pork in a room dressed in rock-and-roll memorabilia, a short walk from the water. We profiled it in full in its winner feature, and it anchors our roundup of where to eat in Kissimmee. A block over, Savion’s Place on E. Dakin Avenue is the downtown dining room locals name first — a family-owned spot serving fresh New American cooking at lunch and dinner, with a patio made for people-watching.
Broadway Pizza Bar, at 403 Broadway, covers the other downtown essential: New York-style pies, a full bar and a patio where the evening tends to stretch. Between meals, the street itself is the entertainment — small storefronts, murals, and the kind of shops that survive because neighbors shop in them, not because a tour bus stopped.
The monument you have driven past in photographs
At the corner of Monument Avenue and Lakeview Drive stands the strangest and most sincere landmark in Osceola County: the Monument of States. Built in 1943, in the shadow of Pearl Harbor, it was the project of Dr. Charles Bressler-Pettis and the Kissimmee All-States Tourist Club — a 50-foot stepped pyramid faced with roughly 1,500 stones sent from every state and more than twenty countries, raised as a symbol of national unity and, frankly, to put Kissimmee on the tourist map. It worked on both counts. The monument was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015, and a time capsule sealed at its 50th anniversary waits to be opened at its 100th. It takes ten minutes to walk around and read the stones. Give it the ten minutes.
End at the lake
Kissimmee Lakefront Park picks up where downtown leaves off: 25 acres of lawns, paved paths, fishing piers, playgrounds and picnic pavilions along Lake Toho, at 201 Lakeview Drive. The city lists the park as open daily from early morning into the evening, and the honest best hour is the last one — sunset over one of Florida’s great bass lakes, with downtown’s restaurants a short walk behind you. Big Toho Marina, inside the park, is the working end of the waterfront, with boat ramps and a fishing pier. We walk the whole route in our Lakefront Park and Lake Toho guide.
How to do it well
Come on a Friday if you can: the Kissimmee Valley Farmers Market sets up at the lakefront on its market Fridays (see our market guide), and downtown hums a little louder. Park once, walk Broadway, read the monument, finish at the water. If you are plotting the rest of a Kissimmee day — airboats, Old Town, the 192 corridor — pin everything on our Orlando Top Spots Map before you set out. The corridor will still be there tomorrow. This version of Kissimmee is the one worth structuring a day around.
Photo: Pokemonprime, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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