It's 'City of Homes,' not Graveyard of Homes

There’s a plaque on the entryway façade of the Capen House that brags about the home being on the Register of Historic Places in gleaming brass letters. It’s still there, letting everybody know how historic and special the house is, while a wrecking ball waits. The protection the plaque stands for was revoked, but it’s still hanging there because it looks nice on the house. On any other home in Winter Park bearing it, that badge of honor impresses the neighbors as well as stopping the wrecking ball. History has its value in some ways.

In Winter Park, banks and real estate firms know that value too. They’ll say a home is historic, brag about its back story, its real connection to the town, knowing full well that if they put the plaque up to make it official the house’s price would tumble. The value is in the freedom to keep the house as it is, or bulldoze it for your own artistic vision. On the open market, frequently our pride in our collective past is worth less than our individual dreams of the future.

It’s like when you see a curvaceous 1965 Jaguar XKE convertible, but the suspension’s been chopped, a fiberglass hood thrown on to hide a supercharger, plus some chrome wheels and an electric green paint job with neon pink racing stripes. The guy behind the wheel might think his Jag is the cat’s pajamas. To the rest of us, we’d rather he left it alone. But he owns it. It’s his money.

But the electric eyesore Jag can hide in a garage. When you’re dealing with replacing a historic home in a historic town, the new eyesore is the garage. And in Winter Park, where there’s nothing stopping homeowners from razing a 120-year-old home whenever they feel like it, our neighborhoods are left up to the taste of the new owner.

The neighbors have no say, but they have to pay the price. Nobody has ever moved into a historic home in Winter Park hoping that the two nice old houses next door would disappear and be replaced by “faux historic” with double the footprint.

Not much vitriol has been directed toward the Pokorny family, which owns the Capen House. That’s because the Pokornys are planning, or at least were planning, to do what 1,000 homeowners in Winter Park have done before them: destroy an older, smaller home to make way for a newer, bigger one. Never mind that by Central Florida standards the current home is already huge and received $700,000 in restoration work in the last few years by former owner Clardy Malugen. It’s their property, they’ll do what they want. But in a welcome concession to history they’ve granted the home a reprieve while the Commission, or more likely the residents, try to figure out how to save it.

Make no mistake, if it happens at all, it’s almost definitely going to be the residents who save the Capen House, despite them putting Commissioners in office precisely to make these kinds of hard decisions.

So far preserving Winter Park’s neighborhoods has been largely left up to the free market.

That’s how Winter Park’s alleged historic protections work now, allowing the current homeowner, at their leisure, to decide whether they want their home to stay the way it is forever. Some say that to impose rules on a homeowner is like the government taking their rights. They have a good argument.

But then there’s the counter-argument: If you want to live in a historic community, you should plan on preserving that history. As it is, any lottery winner could buy a home in Winter Park right now, bulldoze their century-old, non-historically designated home, replace it with a stucco castle five-times the size, burn every tree on the property, replace them with a few saplings a few inches wide, and they’d be totally within their rights. That’s the minimum standard the Winter Park Commission has set. And that bar is sadly far too low if they expect the city to keep its same charm.

“In the end, our society will be defined not by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy,” The Nature Conservancy president John C. Sawhill once said. He died in May of 2000, a year before the city saved Casa Feliz from becoming the grave upon which the largest home in the city now stands.

And that’s where the penny drops. If Winter Park’s Commission doesn’t have the courage to stand up to protect the city’s homes, then the same torrent of buyers who just want that new house smell will keep moving in and destroying the city’s history for a better view of their lakefront. And they’ll do it because the Commission, like that bad parent who lets their kid go wild in the classy restaurant, is too scared to say no.