Lake Wales revitalization scheme emphasizes greenery
Lake Wales is synonymous with botanical bounty.
The city is known throughout Florida and beyond as the home of Bok Tower Gardens, a 92-year-old attraction esteemed for its “singing” edifice and for its acres of meticulously cultivated landscapes.
The designer of Bok Tower Gardens also created a master plan for the city’s core, envisioning Lake Wales as a verdant hamlet speckled with small parks. But city leaders never fully translated that design into reality.
Nine decades later, Lake Wales has revived the concept of “a city in a garden.” Lake Wales Main Street Inc., a private partnership that promotes downtown economic development, commissioned a prestigious design firm to create a revitalization blueprint roughly based on that city plan from 1931.
The result was Lake Wales Connected, a heavily illustrated guide for transforming downtown. The city, through the Lake Wales Community Redevelopment Agency, commissioned an additional guide for revitalizing the Northwest neighborhood.
The combined plan, developed by Dover, Kohl & Partners of Coral Gables, calls for an infusion of trees and other plants, redesigns of two downtown streets and pedestrian-friendly connections from downtown to the Northwest area and Lake Wailes Park and a thematic extension to Bok Tower Gardens.
“It’s funny how sometimes you have to hire someone from outside the community to tell us what we already knew,” said Karen Thompson, executive director of Lake Wales Main Street. “We knew we had garden greatness at Bok Tower. We knew it. It’s phenomenal. And yet the community, downtown, our neighborhoods, did not reflect that garden greatness that Bok Tower had. As a matter of fact, we were not only not complementing each other, we were falling way short on landscaping.”
Dover, Kohl & Partners produced two sets of plans in late 2019: a 62-page packet for downtown and a 50-page packet for the Northwest area. Artists’ renderings in the portfolios portray a future city with more downtown businesses, more visually appealing streetscapes and walkable connections between neighborhoods and parks.
The plans include more than 100 recommended actions grouped into near-term (one to three years), mid-term (four to six years) and longer-term (seven years or more). Projects are ranked in five categories of cost, from under $200,000 to more than $10 million.
Public funding will cover most of the projects’ costs, said Michael Manning, Lake Wales’ management analyst. The city will borrow an expected $7 million to cover the redesigns of Park Avenue and Market Plaza.
Thompson, who also serves as assistant director of Lake Wales’ Community Redevelopment Agency, said the overall idea emerged from discussions after the nonprofit Lake Wales Main Street reorganized a few years ago.
“One of the very first things I asked the board when I came on board was, ‘What’s the plan? In other words, what do we want to be when we say we’ve done it?’ ” Thompson said. “Nobody could really answer that question. So Main Street committed to getting what’s called a downtown revitalization strategy.”
Formerly a typical downtown merchants’ group, Lake Wales Main Street has formed wider associations in recent years, Thompson said, drawing financial support from the likes of AdventHealth Lake Wales and Duke Energy. The group paid $93,000 for Dover, Kohl & Partners to study the city and develop a downtown revitalization plan.
The city paid $95,000 for the Northwest area plan.
The international firm, which promotes “sustainable town planning,” has created downtown plans for Albuquerque, New Mexico; Missoula, Montana; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, among other cities.
Inching toward construction
Lake Wales Main Street held a series of public meetings in 2019 to gather suggestions used to help develop the plan, which has won three industry awards. Since receiving the report from Dover, Kohl & Partners, city leaders have been engaged in what Manning calls the “soft side” of revitalization through such efforts as down payment assistance, training programs and changing zoning requirements.
The CRA has also taken steps to promote construction of affordable housing in the Northwest.
The city will begin seeking bids in the next month or two for construction of a Park Avenue connector trail, Manning said, and soon after that for the Park Avenue street redesign. Trail construction will take about six months, he said, while the street work will take at least a year.
Though the plan emphasizes esthetics and what might be considered indirect investments, Thompson said the ultimate goal is to draw businesses and residents to Lake Wales and to bolster city revenues.
“There’s no better place to raise the tax base than the concentration of downtown,” she said. “That is where you are going to raise the tax base the quickest and the most, period, is in the historic core. Any economist from here to kingdom come will tell you that.”
The Lake Wales Connected portfolio contains a copy of a 1931 map created by Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts, showing the existing city core with proposed streets, parks and neighborhoods. Frederic Law Olmsted Jr., son of the man who designed New York’s Central Park, created the plan after designing Bok Tower Gardens and Mountain Lake Estates, a private community.
Manning said the city is seeking to restore “the Olmsted vision,” making downtown Lake Wales a destination in its own right.
“We have a lot of folks that they come in town and spend a few minutes in town, get to Bok Tower, spend the whole day and then leave,” he said. “And the hope is that we can create kind of an overall, community-wide place for folks to visit outside of just Bok Tower, so it’s an amenity to that as well.”
Thompson said the plan’s name addresses a current weakness in the city.
“Throughout the entire process, we figured, ‘Look, we need to be connected,’ ” she said. “Nothing was connected. The downtown wasn’t connected to the Northwest, wasn’t connected to beautiful Bok Tower, wasn’t really connected to the museum. We just weren’t connected to the lake.”
Transforming streets
Both sections of the plan stress five “big ideas”: design, activate, connect, populate and empower.
“Making design a top priority means taking a close look at all of the things between buildings — streets, parks, plazas — and making them more pleasant and usable and inviting,” the plan states.
“Activate” means making downtown a thriving place after business hours and restoring Lincoln Avenue as an active neighborhood center. “Connect” involves street design changes, new walkways and gateways, such as a roundabout at Scenic Highway and Burns Avenue, intended “to create stronger physical and psychological connections” between downtown and Lake Wailes Park, the Northwest neighborhood and Bok Tower Gardens.
“Populate” reflects the potential for downtown living and infill in the Northwest to create “a vibrant urban core,” the plan says. “Empower” implies making it easier to start a business, build on a vacant lot or renovate an existing building.
The plan proposes converting Park Avenue, now a one-way street with angled parking spaces, into a two-way road with parallel parking. It also suggests extending Market Place Plaza across Park Avenue and eventually connecting it to a new town square that replaces parking lots to the north.
The goal is to increase “people space” and decrease vehicle space, in some cases through widened sidewalks and planting areas and narrower traffic lanes. The plan also suggests a significant increase in bike lanes, especially downtown, and calls for “pedestrian-scaled” street lights and signs.
Illustrations in the blueprint show brick streets in downtown, an element that Thompson said provides a sense of "arrival."
The strategy proposes four gateways to create character and a sense of place. In addition to the Scenic Highway roundabout, the plan proposes an architectural gateway at Central Avenue and Wetmore Street and symbolic structures at Central and First Street and the entrance to Crystal Lake Park.
The predominantly Black Northwest area has seen businesses close in recent decades, and it now contains vacant buildings and empty lots, the plan says. The neighborhood was designated in 1990 as Community Redevelopment Area. That status, based on state guidelines, allows the local government to use taxes for a variety of improvements.
The neighborhood is bordered by Scenic Highway to the east, Florida Avenue to the north, G Street to the west and Wiltshire, Seaboard and Seminole Avenues to the south.
The portfolio envisions thickening the street tree canopy, filling vacant lots with a mix of housing and creating a linear park along the rail line. It also calls for turning Grove Manor, a public-housing complex in aging condition, into a complete, mixed-income neighborhood that connects downtown and the Northwest neighborhood.
The plan suggests drawing upon federal Hope VI funds available through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Tending the garden
Above all, the strategy emphasizes the need to “garden the city.” It envisions a continuous downtown tree canopy, relying mostly on live oaks to produce shade, a feature intended to improve the pedestrian experience.
The portfolios include several renderings of proposed future versions of city scenes, with the current conditions in smaller, inset photos. The online summary of the plan includes several images bisected by vertical lines than can be slid to show “before” and “after” versions. Sliding the bars to the left produces a profusion of green from new flora.
The report says that shade trees increase property values by 5% to 15%.
The emphasis on botanical features prompted the city to hire its first full-time horticulturist, Lester Gulledge, in February. Gulledge, who studied forestry at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, previously ran a farm, worked at a zoo and owned a landscaping business and garden shop.
“He’s going to have a critical role in it from the very beginning of designing all the way through 20 years from now to see if it’s really successful,” Manning said. “Once these things go in the ground from our contractors, from day one to the end their life cycles it’s going to be him keeping these things alive — the annuals, perennials, street trees. He will be the guy.”
Gulledge, 36, said he has been educating himself on endemic Florida plants and studying the Lake Wales Connected plan. Though he wasn’t involved in creating the plan, he said he is impressed with the botanical elements.
Gulledge said the designs emphasize shade trees, along with understory trees and large planting beds. Those will include groupings of colorful flowering annuals on corners.
As he waits for the new streetscapes to take shape, Gulledge is overseeing some “one-off” planting projects. He recently directed the planting of pollinator-attracting species on a strip in front of the 100-foot “Slice of Happiness” mural painted last fall by Lakeland artist Gillian Fazio along Scenic Highway at Stuart Avenue.
The strip, roughly 500 foot long and five feet wide, now holds firebush, black-eyed Susan, spotted bee balm, prairie blazing star and goldenrod plants. Gulledge is awaiting the arrival of 140 milkweed plants from a nursery but said he has already noticed butterflies and bees attracted to the new plants.
Gulledge suggested that making Lake Wales a more enticing place for insects can have the same effect for humans.
“Sometimes plant people, the reason why they’re plant people is they’re not as good with people, and I think sometimes the social aspects of this kind of work can fall through the cracks,” he said. “So that’s something I feel is important that that not happen. So I’ve considered that often — what’s the ultimate goal here, not just having to do with plants? I see me falling into a role where I can just do my best to give the people of the city something they can be proud of.”
Though the city has not yet begun altering streets or planting oak trees, Thompson said the Lake Wales Connected plan has already had a positive effect.
“What’s so interesting about Lake Wales is we have yet to put down our first brick, and just with this plan in the past year we’ve had over $3 million in downtown sales and remodeling,” she said.
As an example, Thompson cited The Ranch Taproom and Coffeehouse, opened by a mother-daughter team last year in a long-vacant space at 247 E. Park Ave., in a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The owners received a $100,000 reimbursement grant from the Lake Wales CRA, Manning said.
Thompson said developers and entrepreneurs recognize what has happened with downtown revitalizations in other cities and anticipate what will come in Lake Wales.
“What’s so lovely here, and I think it’s because of this downtown revitalization boom, we don’t have to recreate the wheel,” Thompson said. “It’s obviously been done in so many communities, and so what were reaping the benefits of is when we advertise this new plan and what’s in store for downtown, the private sector is already kicking in with the understanding that the city is going to follow through with this. So it’s already started.”
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.