Drive the right quiet street in Maitland, a few miles north of Orlando, and you pass something that has no business being in Florida at all. White stucco walls step up into a Mayan skyline. The doorways are framed in carved stone faces — suns, birds, a monkey god or two — and there are more than two thousand of them, no two the same. It looks like a fragment of a lost city, or a very good movie set. It is neither. One middle-aged man built it by hand, and he did it after the century had already done its worst to him.
A town the frost nearly erased
Maitland started as a gun. In 1838, during the Second Seminole War, the U.S. Army put a small log fort on the shore of a lake here and named it for Captain William Seton Maitland, an officer who had fought in the war and died soon after. The fort lasted barely a year. The name stuck to the lake, and then to the settlement that grew up around it after the Civil War, when Northerners came down to plant orange groves and a railroad finally reached the place in 1880.
Then the thing that haunts every Central Florida citrus town happened. The Great Freeze of 1894–95 killed the groves to the ground over two brutal winters, and a lot of people who had bet everything on oranges simply left. Maitland did not vanish, but it shrank back into a small, shaded, half-forgotten place between the bigger ambitions of Orlando and Winter Park. That is the town — quiet, a little faded, nobody’s idea of an art capital — that a famous man chose, on purpose, in the depths of the Depression.
The man who had seen too much
Jules André Smith was born in Hong Kong in 1880 to American parents, trained as an architect at Cornell, and then walked away from architecture to become an artist. He was a very good one — an etcher who won the gold medal for etching at the 1915 world’s fair in San Francisco. He had the kind of career that keeps a man in New York.
The war took him instead. In 1917 Smith put on a uniform, and in 1918 he became one of eight official artists the Army sent to France to record the American Expeditionary Forces — the senior man of the group, the only one with real military training. He drew the front from inside it.
He came home decorated and, in a quiet way, famous. He is credited with designing the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor — an architect’s eye applied to a medal. He published a book of about a hundred of his field sketches. And he carried something else home with him.
During officer training at Plattsburg he had cut his leg on barbed wire. The wound never healed. In 1924 the right leg was amputated, and he lived the rest of his life in constant pain. By the mid-1930s a second door was closing: his eyesight had failed too far for the fine, patient lines that etching demands. A man who made his living with his eyes and his legs had, in the span of a decade, badly lost the use of both.
He could not etch anymore and he could barely walk. So he went looking for something he could still make — something bigger than a sheet of paper, that he could build slowly, with his hands, in the sun.
Six acres and a patron
He found the sun in Central Florida. Smith first came down in 1930 looking for a winter studio, found nothing he liked, and ended up renting a house in Winter Park. What turned a winter escape into a life’s work was money — specifically the money of Mary Louise Curtis Bok, the Philadelphia publishing heiress who had already built the Singing Tower gardens near Lake Wales and founded the Curtis Institute of Music. She agreed to buy six acres on the edge of Lake Maitland and pay for the first stage of building. In 1937, Smith started pouring concrete.
He called it the Research Studio, and he meant the word. It was not a gallery and not a home — it was a working winter colony where invited artists could come and experiment, away from the market and the critics. Over the years the guest list got serious: the painter Milton Avery worked here, so did Ralston Crawford and the photographer Consuelo Kanaga. But the real artwork was the place itself.
What he built out of nothing but cement
What Smith built, across the years that followed, was a compound of fourteen low buildings in stucco and concrete block, laid out around courtyards and a reflecting pool, in a style the building survey file calls Aztec-Mayan — the kind of thing that was rare anywhere in the Southeast and is unique in Central Florida. He did not import it. He invented it, surface by surface.
The reliefs are the heart of it. More than 2,500 of them — suns and serpents, birds, faces, leaves — were carved and cast in concrete, most of them by Smith and a family friend named Ralph Ponder, doing the work themselves. For a half-blind man with one leg, this was not decoration. It was the whole point: a way of making art the size of a building when he could no longer make it the size of a page.
He built a chapel into it, and a garden chapel courtyard, and a lily pond with a statue standing at its head — the kind of quiet, shaded, slightly unreal place that makes more sense the longer you stand in it. Guests painted in the mornings and argued about art in the evenings. Smith lived on the grounds and kept working until he died there, at the studio, in 1959.
The one thing still standing
Here is the part that would have surprised the people who watched a sick man pour concrete into the shape of a daydream. Old Maitland is mostly gone. The groves froze out. The boom towns around it paved over their own histories. And the fragile-looking fantasy that a half-blind veteran built by hand is the piece that lasted.
It is the Maitland Art Center now, part of the Art & History Museums of the city, still running classes and residencies the way Smith meant it to. It went on the National Register in 1982 and was made a National Historic Landmark in 2014 — a rank almost nothing else in Central Florida holds. The man who could no longer trust his eyes or his leg had, without quite meaning to, built the most durable thing for miles.
Stand at that carved gate and the strangeness resolves into something simpler. Smith did not come to Maitland to make a monument. He came because two winters of war and a decade of his own body failing had left him looking for something that would outlast all of it — and he found it in the one material that doesn’t forget a freeze or a hurricane. The lost city on the quiet street is a lesson in what it takes to still be standing when everything around you isn’t.
