The Morse Museum & Winter Park: The Anti-Theme-Park Day

Twenty minutes northeast of the theme parks there is a different Florida: Winter Park, a separate and considerably older town of brick streets, live oaks, chain lakes and old money, built as a winter resort in the 1880s and never really unbuilt. This is the anti-theme-park day — art, boutiques, water — and the reason it earns a full day is a museum that would be famous anywhere.

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art holds the world’s most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany: the leaded-glass windows and lamps, but also the jewelry, pottery and interiors that show the range of the studio. The room that stops people is the Tiffany Chapel — the complete Byzantine-style chapel interior Tiffany built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, its glass mosaic columns and electrified chandelier reassembled here in full after a century of near-loss. It is the single unmissable room in greater Orlando, and you should give the museum an unhurried morning.

The museum sits at the top of Park Avenue, Winter Park’s oak-lined brick main street, and the rest of the day flows downhill from it in the best way: boutiques and galleries on one side, the Central Park green on the other, sidewalk cafés for a long lunch. From near the bottom of the avenue, the Winter Park Scenic Boat Tour leaves for an hour-long pontoon cruise through three of the chain lakes and the narrow, canopy-shaded canals dug between them — past old-money estates, cypress stands and the lakefront campus of Rollins College. It is gentle, slightly kitsch and completely right.

How the day flows. Morse Museum in the morning while attention is fresh, a slow lunch on Park Avenue, the boat tour in the afternoon, and a final coffee or stroll through Central Park before heading back. Everything is walkable once you arrive; on weekdays the SunRail commuter train reaches Winter Park and drops you a block from the avenue, which makes this the rare Orlando day that needs no car at all.