Lake Wales recognized for Olmsted legacy

A national organization has recognized Lake Wales’ connection to the Olmsted design legacy while calling for a restoration of its planner’s vision of a garden city.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., has included Lake Wales in a list of 12 North American sites planned by Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., the firm he founded or its successor firms. Olmsted’s son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., drafted a design for Lake Wales in 1931, and the city is now pursuing a range of projects aimed at adding elements of his original concept.

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The foundation on Tuesday released an annual report, Landslide, that highlights “threatened and at-risk landscapes and landscape features.” This year’s report centers on Olmsted-related sites, most of them in much larger cities than Lake Wales. The list includes Franklin Park in Boston, Deepdene Park at Druid Hills in Atlanta and Olmsted Woods at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., as well as the California State Parks System.

The report is accompanied by an online presentation devoted to each of the 12 locations. A section on the foundation's website (www.tclf.org) offers a detailed history of Lake Wales and says the city's current revitalization scheme offers "a unique opportunity to remain faithful to the form, scale, color, and texture of the Olmsted firm’s tree planting plan."

Robert Connors, president of Lake Wales Heritage, said the city will benefit from its inclusion in the report.

“This is a major step forward, this kind of international recognition of the cultural heritage of Lake Wales, and the fact that it is a valuable cultural landscape,” Connors said. “Not just Bok Tower (Gardens) but the city itself was a planned garden city, and it's not recognized as such.”

Lake Wales Heritage, a nonprofit, is coordinating with the city on planting trees to recapture Olmsted’s vision of “a city in a garden.”

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In the section on Lake Wales, the Landslide report emphasizes the importance of tree corridors in the 1931 plan, which called for streets bordered by single or double rows of Washingtonia palms and understory trees.

“Over the years, deferred maintenance and increasingly severe storms have led to significant tree loss and the degradation of the Olmsted firm’s carefully laid out street tree plan,” the report says.

Lake Wales is implementing a years-long plan, known as Lake Wales Connected, based on Olmsted’s 1931 design. The plan emphasizes widescale tree planting to bolster the city’s green canopy.

Lake Wales Main Street Inc., a private partnership that promotes downtown economic development, commissioned the plan, developed by Dover, Kohl & Partners of Coral Gables in 2019. The plan contains more than 100 recommended actions, some to be accomplished within three years and others taking seven years or more.

The Lake Wales Connected plan goes well beyond tree planting. It includes revitalization of the Northwest neighborhood and promotion of affordable housing and downtown businesses, combined a general intent of making the city more inviting for pedestrians.

The city has already completed five of the projects, and about 30 are in progress, Lake Wales spokesperson Eric Marshall said.

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Michael Manning, assistant to the city manager, nning said Lake Wales recently formed a tree advisory board, in partnership with Lake Wales Heritage, and is developing a tree inventory.

“I think one of our key concerns and threats would only be that there was quite a gap in time, in terms of city-planted trees,” Manning said. “So we have trees that are 50-plus years old, and there was really a decade or two, maybe more, gap of planting these trees. So we don't necessarily have the most diverse tree canopy in age, which is something we're really trying to fix right now with our efforts of planting new trees.”

Connors, a lifelong Lake Wales resident, said he contacted The Cultural Landscape Foundation, knowing that the group planned to devote the 2022 report to the Olmsted legacy to mark the 200th anniversary of the elder Olmsted’s birth. Connors said officials with the foundation were not aware that Olmsted Jr. had designed the city after he had overseen the creation of Bok Tower Gardens.

“And they were immediately very, very curious, wanted to know a lot more about the history of it, how it came to be,” Connors said.

Connors cited Tillman Avenue, which he said was originally lined with nearly 200 trees. He estimates that about 30 remain.

“And so, our purpose is to recognize that fact and work toward reversing the process and making sure that what's left is sustained and what's missing is put back,” he said.

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Lake Wales Heritage, founded in 2018, is leading an effort to replant areas of the city outside of the boundaries of the Lake Wales Connected plan, Connors said. The group has so far planted trees on about eight blocks along Fourth Street and Lakeshore Boulevard, he said.

Manning said the city’s revitalization scheme calls for the planting of live oaks to create leafy corridors, along with such smaller species as crepe myrtles, date palms and cabbage palms. He noted that some plant species Olmsted named in his 1931 design plan are now considered invasive and avoided in Florida landscapes.

The Lake Wales City Commission is expected to give approval soon for a construction agreement on the Park Avenue streetscape, which calls for the conversion of a one-way street with angled parking spaces into a two-way road with parallel parking. A rendering in the design plan shows an avenue lined with leafy shade trees on one side and flowering crepe myrtles on the other.

“You’re going to see these cathedral live oaks lining all the streets in the core and the historic downtown,” Manning said. “Of course, it's going to take years to do, but I think we're making great progress on it.”

Connors said the publicity provided by The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s report could bring grants or other outside funding to help pay for the greening of Lake Wales.

“We’re very, very hopeful that this may help us raise our appeal nationally and even internationally, when we apply for grants and when we cite this recognition,” he said. “There’s a number of foundations that seek places to put their money and programs to support that we may not even know about that sometimes, money just kind of rains down, so to speak.”

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: National report warns of threats to Olmsted legacy in Lake Wales