One night at the end of August in 2009, a bolt of lightning dropped out of a Florida thunderstorm and hit the fountain in the middle of Lake Eola. In a second it did what nothing in half a century had managed to do: it switched off the most recognizable thing in Orlando. The jets stopped. The colored lights died. The spray that had stood over the lake every night since Eisenhower was in the White House simply went out — and it stayed out, as it turned out, for almost two years.
To understand why a broken fountain made the news — why the mayor had to stand up and promise the city would turn it back on — you have to know whose front yard that lake is, and who built the thing in the first place.
The neighborhood on the water
Just off the east shore of Lake Eola sits Thornton Park: a few blocks of brick streets and old bungalows under big live oaks, laid out starting around 1915 and named, by most accounts, for the developer who platted it, James Thornton. It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Orlando, and its whole orientation is toward the water.
The lake is the reason people come. It is a round, calm, 23-acre basin in the middle of downtown, ringed by a walking path, patrolled by swans, and centered on that fountain. Walk the Thornton Park side at dusk and the fountain is simply what you look at. Which is why, when it went dark, the whole city noticed a hole where its emblem used to be.
A lake that started as a hole in the ground
Lake Eola is not really a lake in the way you’d draw one. It is a sinkhole — the ground over an underground cavern gave way and filled with water, better than 80 feet deep at its middle.
In 1883 a cattleman named Jacob Summerlin — rich enough that people called him the Cattle King of Florida — donated the land around the sinkhole so the city could make it a park. The water took the name Eola, the story goes, after a young woman who died only weeks before her wedding. For its first half-century the lake was a plain, pretty thing: a shoreline, a bandstand, a modest fountain that went in back in 1912 for ten thousand dollars.
The lake you picture now — the tall, lit, roaring one — didn’t arrive until the 1950s. And it didn’t come from the parks department. It came from the electric company.
The power company’s monument of light
Orlando owns its own utility. The Orlando Utilities Commission — OUC — is a municipally owned company that has supplied the city’s electricity and water since 1923. It is the reason the lights come on here at all.
In the mid-1950s, as Orlando approached a hundred years since its beginnings, OUC decided to give the city a birthday present. It built a fountain in the middle of Lake Eola and handed it over to the town. It was dedicated in 1957 as the “Centennial Fountain,” at a cost of about $350,000 — a serious sum for a fountain in the Eisenhower years. The project was driven by a local banker, Linton E. Allen, who ran the First National Bank of Orlando; after he died in 1965, the city renamed the fountain in his honor.
Think about that for a second. The company whose entire job is keeping the power flowing built the city a monument that is pure power — pumps, jets, and underwater lights, choreographed. On a quiet night the fountain throws a six-minute show: colored water climbing and falling in time to music. The city fell for it completely. The fountain’s silhouette turned up on street signs, on stationery, on the logo of the place. It stopped being a fountain and became the way Orlando drew a picture of itself.
The one thing Florida has too much of
Here is the problem with building your city’s symbol out of electricity in Central Florida: this is the part of the country that gets struck by lightning more than any other. Summer afternoons here come with thunderheads the size of mountains, and the strikes come with them, every day, for months.
In late August 2009, one of those strikes found the fountain. It hit the structure out on the water and rendered the whole thing inoperable — pumps, lights, jets, dead. The spray stopped. And the timing could hardly have been worse: the city was in the middle of a budget crisis, and for a while, no one could say whether the fountain would ever run again.
Dark
The city carried a $1 million insurance policy on the fountain. The catch was a $500,000 deductible — so half a million dollars had to come from somewhere before the insurance even began to help. In a down year, that is a real argument, held in public, while the middle of the lake sat empty.
A city can lose its symbol to the weather in a single second. Getting it back took almost two years, a mayor’s promise, and a fight over a half-million-dollar deductible.
On October 15, 2009, Mayor Buddy Dyer announced that the city would not just patch it. It would rebuild it — replace the fountain’s cracked plastic skin and install, in his words, “a state-of-the-art system of lights and water jets” — at a cost of around $2.3 million. That decision made the wait longer, not shorter. For month after month, the view from the Thornton Park shore was of a flat lake with nothing rising out of its center.
Back on
It came back on the Fourth of July, 2011 — rededicated and running again, almost two years after the strike. The new version threw its water higher and lit it brighter than the old one ever had. The nightly show returned. The emblem the city had been missing was, suddenly, standing over the lake again.
Stand on the Thornton Park side of the lake tonight and none of the dark years show. The water climbs and falls in colored light the way it has for most of the last seventy years, and it is easy to forget it was ever off. But the story the fountain quietly tells is the same one every Florida summer repeats: the brightest thing in the city runs on power, and power is the one thing a storm can switch off in a single second. The only question that ever really mattered — for the fountain, and for everyone living around that lake — was how long until someone could turn it back on.
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