Walk down New Broad Street in Baldwin Park on an ordinary afternoon and it is about the most peaceable place in Orlando: brick crossings, shaded shopfronts, people on second-floor porches, a lake at the end of the street. It looks like it was always here. It was not. Twenty-five years ago this was a fenced military base — and one of the things the Navy did on this exact ground was teach sailors the physics of power that cannot be allowed to fail.
That is the odd thing about Baldwin Park. A neighborhood that now loses its lights in every hurricane season was built on top of a school obsessed with power that doesn’t.
An airfield, then a boot camp
The land started out in uniform. In 1940 the Army built an air base here, on the flatwoods northeast of downtown Orlando, and flew out of it through the Second World War and into the Cold War as an Air Force installation. In 1968 the Air Force handed it to the Navy, which stood up Naval Training Center Orlando — the country’s third boot camp — on the first of July that year.
For the next twenty-six years this was where the Navy made sailors. More than 650,000 recruits came through before it closed — marched across a concrete drill field they called the grinder, and sent to sea from a warship that sat, bizarrely, on dry land. The Bluejacket was a full-size ship’s superstructure poured in concrete so recruits could learn the deck of a vessel a thousand miles from the ocean.
Recruits were only part of it. The base held a hospital, a service-school command, and — starting in 1976 — the hardest classroom in the entire Navy.
The school for power that can’t quit
In 1976 the Navy moved its Nuclear Power School to Orlando. Its job was to turn ordinary enlisted sailors and young officers into people who could run the reactor on a submarine or an aircraft carrier — six months of college-level physics, thermodynamics, reactor theory and chemistry, taught at a pace that washed people out by the dozen.
Think about what that reactor is for. A submarine underwater cannot plug into anything. Its power plant has to make its own electricity, its own air, its own fresh water, and run for years without refueling, because the alternative to the power staying on is not darkness — it is drowning. Orlando’s school existed to produce the people who keep that kind of power from ever going out.
Here is the twist most people miss: no reactor ever ran in Orlando. There was nothing nuclear humming under the Florida grass. The school taught the minds; the actual reactors were a continent away, at a cluster of prototype plants out in the Idaho desert and at sites in upstate New York and Connecticut, where graduates went next to put their hands on the real thing. Orlando was the part where you learned why it worked before you were allowed near one.
On this ground, the whole point was power that never stops. A mile of classrooms taught it; not one watt of it was ever generated here.
The order to close
In 1993 a federal commission put NTC Orlando on the list of bases the country no longer needed. The shutdown came in waves: the boot camp and hospital first, then the service schools, and last of all the nuclear command. The final class of nuclear students in Orlando, class 9806, finished at the end of 1998, and the school packed up and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, by January 1999.
The Navy left behind thirteen hundred acres of drill fields, barracks, classrooms and a concrete ship, five minutes from downtown Orlando, with nothing to do.
Tearing down a base to build a town
What happened next was unusually ambitious. Rather than sell the base off in pieces, the city and a master developer wiped most of it away and started over. More than 250 buildings came down. The concrete and masonry weren’t hauled to a landfill — they were crushed on site and reused as fill and road base, which the project reckoned saved roughly 30,000 dump-truck trips off Orlando’s roads.
In its place went down 25 miles of new streets and about 200 miles of utilities — and, from the first day, the lines went in underground. Then came the thing the base never was: a town. Planners laid out Baldwin Park on New Urbanist lines — narrow walkable streets, shops under apartments, houses pushed up near the sidewalk with porches facing it, all wrapped around the old base’s lake. The reuse was clean enough that the federal government later handed the project a national award for turning a shut military site back into something a city could use.
Within a few years, families were living on streets named for the base that used to be there. The grinder where recruits once graduated became a park with a lake and a lawn.
Back on the ordinary grid
And here the story quietly turns back on itself. For all that it was built on the Navy’s monument to unfailing power, Baldwin Park gets its electricity the same way every other Orlando neighborhood does — from the local grid, one utility, one set of lines. The lines are newer and buried, which helps. But buried lines still feed from poles and substations out in the weather, and Central Florida is hurricane country.
When Charley, Frances and Jeanne crossed the state in 2004, when Irma came through in 2017, when Milton raked Orlando in 2024, the lights went out across the region — and Baldwin Park sat in the dark with everyone else. The ground that trained the Navy’s reactor operators has, as a neighborhood, exactly the resilience of any other suburb: good until the storm, then a candle and a cooler like the rest of us.
What you can still see
The base hides in plain sight. The lake the Navy drilled around is now Lake Baldwin, with a park named after the training ship on its shore — where a pair of statues and a wall of history panels are about all that mark what stood here. Dig in the right drainage swale and the crushed concrete of the demolished buildings is still down there. And the name keeps surfacing on the signs: Bluejacket on a park, Blue Jacket on a gastropub, a street grid that remembers a drill field.
Stand on one of those porches the next time a hurricane knocks the power out and the whole neighborhood goes quiet and dark around you. There is a real irony in it, and it’s worth feeling for a second: this was the one patch of Orlando where the United States Navy taught people, in exacting detail, how to make sure the power never, ever goes out — and today it keeps its lights on exactly as well as the subdivision down the road.
