United States · Florida · Orlando
Lake Eola Heights Historic District, Orlando — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Old oaks shade the brick streets of Lake Eola Heights Historic District, a quarter of 487 historic buildings immediately east of Downtown Orlando.
About Lake Eola Heights Historic District
Where to stay in Lake Eola Heights Historic District
Each area has its own feel; here's who each one suits.
Lake Eola Heights Historic District keeps almost all of its ground residential, so the lodging gathers at the western rim along North Magnolia Avenue, a block from the downtown offices. The interior is porches and oaks. Cathcart Avenue and East Amelia Street cross at the geographic center of the district, and the blocks around that crossing stay quiet after dark, with brick paving underfoot and canopy overhead.
Pick the Magnolia edge for a short walk into downtown, or the inner streets if you would rather wake to birds than traffic.
About Lake Eola Heights Historic District
What are the main landmarks in Lake Eola Heights Historic District?
Lake Eola Heights Historic District holds churches and schools rather than museums. Trinity Lutheran Church rises in red brick on East Livingston Street, its battlemented bell tower and rose window carrying the Gothic Revival of 1926, the same year Broadway United Methodist Church raised its colossal Ionic portico on North Broadway Avenue. St. James Cathedral School runs a whole block of East Ridgewood Street.
Barrel tile covers it. Howard Middle School closes the southeastern corner, built as Orlando High School behind a portico of the same order. Lake Eola itself lies one block south of the boundary, on the northeast edge of downtown.
What is the history of Lake Eola Heights Historic District?
Lake Eola Heights Historic District began as citrus. Jacob Summerlin, president of the first Orlando city council, bought 200 acres of this ground late in the nineteenth century, and the Great Freeze of 1894-95 killed the grove and left the land to be cut into house lots. Building quickened after 1905, and the district filled in as a patchwork of small plats with no overall plan, the Lake Eola subdivision of 1914 and Eola Heights of 1919 among them.
Brick paving arrived about 1915. Construction ran on until about 1940, and a federal moratorium on building stopped it the year after.
Where is Lake Eola Heights Historic District?
Lake Eola Heights Historic District runs east from North Magnolia Avenue to North Hyer Avenue, and north from Ridgewood Street to Hillcrest Street.
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Updated September 2026