The man who built this town likes to say that when he started, there was nothing out here but cows. He is close to right. In 1998, on 1,860 acres of flat pasture past the eastern edge of Orlando’s sprawl, a Swiss banker named Beat Kahli began building an entire town where none had ever been — streets, schools, a downtown, a man-made lake with a fountain in the middle of it, and eventually tens of thousands of people.
The whole idea was that you’d never need to leave. Live, learn, work and play, all inside the walk of a few blocks. And for its first few years it worked exactly like the brochure — right up until the summer the sky decided to find out whether a town can really stand on its own.
It really was just cows
Before any of it, this was the far southeast corner of Orange County: cattle land and pine flatwoods, hemmed on its eastern side by the Econlockhatchee River — a slow, tea-colored Florida river the locals just call the Econ. It is the kind of place where, until very recently, the most frequent traffic was livestock.
Kahli’s company, the Avalon Park Group, was founded in 1995, and by one account he did something unusual before he poured a single sidewalk: he sold off most of the land. Of a much larger original holding, thousands of acres went to the county and the local water-management district as preserve and drainage, which left the river edge wild and let him start building the town itself without carrying a mountain of debt.
So the ingredients were strange from the start: a European financier, a square of Central Florida cowfield, a wild river on one side, and a plan to conjure a complete American town out of all of it in a single sustained push.
A town you’d never have to leave
What went up wasn’t a subdivision. It was designed on the principles of New Urbanism — the deliberately old-fashioned idea that a town should have a real center you can walk to, with homes, shops, offices and schools mixed close together instead of marooned in separate pods connected only by car.
The downtown came first as a gesture: a clock tower, raised in 2000, standing over not much yet. Then the buildings filled in around it — a first downtown block in 2002, then more — four- and five-story facades in sherbet colors, apartments stacked over storefronts, a lake dug and shaped as the town’s front yard, with a fountain planted in the middle of it.
The sales line was “live, learn, work and play,” and it was meant literally. The promise of a place like Avalon Park is a kind of independence: everything you need, inside your own walls and sidewalks, so the wider world and its hassles can stay out past the tree line. Build it right, and you’ve designed your way out of needing anyone.
The one thing you can’t build from scratch
Except for one thing. You can lay your own streets and raise your own school and dig your own lake. You cannot make your own electricity. The power that runs the lights, the air conditioning, the water pumps, the traffic signals and the fountain all comes in on wires strung from somewhere else — across the same open country the town was carved out of.
A town can be built to need nothing from the outside world and still depend, completely, on a line of poles marching in from it.
For a new town in Central Florida, that dependency has a season. Every summer the afternoon thunderheads build into the tallest storms in the country, and this stretch of the state gets struck by lightning more than any other. The wires that feed a town like Avalon Park run right through all of it. It was only a matter of time before something larger than a thunderstorm came up the peninsula to test them.
2004: three in six weeks
It came in 2004, and it didn’t come once. In a span of six weeks, three hurricanes crossed Central Florida — a sequence so improbable that people who lived through it still measure other storm seasons against it.
Charley made landfall on the southwest coast on August 13 as a compact, violent Category 4, then turned up the middle of the state. In the early hours of August 14 its eye passed directly over Orlando; the airport recorded sustained hurricane-force winds. For a region that tells itself it is safely inland, it was a direct hit.
Three weeks later, over Labor Day weekend, Frances crossed from the Atlantic side, enormous and slow, and dragged across the peninsula for the better part of two days. Three weeks after that, on the last weekend of September, Jeanne came ashore almost exactly where Frances had and crossed Central Florida again. Each storm, on its own, knocked out power to roughly a million people. Back to back to back, they left crews and residents doing it all three times.
What a storm does to a brand-new town
Where Charley came ashore, at Punta Gorda, whole mobile-home parks were reduced to splinters. The town Avalon Park was modeled against — older, built of sturdier Florida stock — fared better than that. But sturdiness and the grid are two different questions. Across Central Florida the storms did the same thing everywhere: they put the wires on the ground.
And here the shiny, self-contained new town and the oldest trailer park ended up in exactly the same boat. When the line down the road is lying in the street, it does not matter how new your house is, how walkable your downtown is, or how complete your plan was. Without the wire, the air conditioning stops, the refrigerator warms, the pumps quit, and the fountain in the middle of the lake goes still. The newest town in the county went as dark as the oldest.
Getting it back was not a design problem a planner could solve in advance. It was crews in bucket trucks, one pole at a time, spread impossibly thin across a whole state that had been hit three times in six weeks. For Central Florida, the lights came back in days for some and weeks for others — and there was nothing a resident could do but wait for a truck to reach their street.
The thing you can’t walk to
That is the quiet lesson buried in a town built to need nothing. Avalon Park really did think of almost everything. You can walk to the school, the shops, the office, the lake. The one errand the design can never remove is the one that matters most when a storm hits: you cannot walk to electricity. It arrives from outside, or it doesn’t arrive at all.
Stand in Downtown Avalon Park today — the fountain running, the shops open, the whole improbable town humming along as if it had always been here — and it looks like a place that planned for everything. It very nearly did. The one thing it left to the weather is the same thing every Florida town leaves to the weather, and the only question a hurricane ever really asks a place is how long it can go without an answer.
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