FAMILIAR FACES: Jim Crescitelli is West Orange's history buff

Editor’s note: Familiar Faces is an ongoing feature in which we spotlight people you have seen but whose stories you might not know. If you want to nominate someone for a future edition, please email Editor and Publisher Michael Eng, [email protected].

Who is the longtime face of the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation who is present at the history organization’s walking tours, field trips, historical presentations and festivals in downtown Winter Garden? 

That’s Jim Crescitelli, a Brooklyn native who has “adopted” the city as his own and is dedicated to preserving its history and sharing it with the community.

Crescitelli, the foundation’s director of education, is charged with cataloguing and preserving documents and artifacts related to Winter Garden and West Orange County. With an impressive knowledge of all things related to local history, Crescitelli leads interested folks on history tours, takes groups of school children on field trips at the museums and along Plant Street, gives history talks at the foundation’s Heller Hall and is present at downtown events to share the area’s history and answer questions the curious might have.

“I love talking to the people and promoting the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation and just showing how much fun and engaging history can be,” he said.

Courtesy photo

AN INTEREST IN HISTORY
Crescitelli moved in 1978 to Winter Park when he was just 22 years old. His initial introduction to Winter Garden was soon after he got his first car and went exploring in neighboring towns.

“West Orange County was so different than where I was living in Winter Park,” he said. “I loved the rural atmosphere and started taking pictures and putting them in scrapbooks, there were a lot of Oakland and Tildenville.”

He shared those scrapbooks full of photographic history with the Winter Garden History Center in the mid-2000s when it operated in another downtown Plant Street building. Kay Cappleman, then the WGHF director, brought Crescitelli aboard as a volunteer and later offered him a staff position when she discovered his interest in the area and his love for history.

That was 13-and-one-half years ago.

“History, to me, is about people; it’s not a series of dates that have to be memorized,” Crescitelli said. “It’s about the stories of the people, and we’re all connected by the stories we share. West Orange County people have a lot of history to share, and it’s important that legacy is kept for future generations.

“I’m very impressed by the interest people take,” he said. “People are very conscious about living in such a special place, and a lot of people who move here want to know about the history. … We’re more than happy to share — and we hope to continue to share in the future — the life and legacy of the people who lived here and who live here. I’m so interested in their stories.”

In the archives sit many interesting pieces of history. Among Crescitelli’s favorites are hometown hero George McMillan’s World War II Flying Tigers military jacket, a diary kept by a dentist in the early 20th century and the detailed Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of Winter Garden and Tildenville.

“The collection is based on what people bring us, things that have sat for decades, photographs, letters, yearbooks, uniforms from school and the military, business objects and more,” he said. “Sometimes, people show up at the front door with a treasure trove of their family. A woman brought in a scrapbook of photographs she found in a thrift store showing the construction of the power plant that went up in the 1920s across from the railroad museum.”

His favorite stories in the archives are the ones involving the First Baptist Church’s move from Ocoee to Winter Garden in the 1880s; those of local residents beginning to stop downtown’s further deterioration in the early 1990s; and Lake Apopka’s rise, fall and rehabilitation efforts.

Crescitelli said he is grateful for the historical knowledge that has been shared for decades by one longtime local historian.

“One of my favorite Winter Garden persons is Rod Reeves,” he said. “I credit Rod Reeves with a lot.”

Reeves was the first director of the Winter Garden Heritage Museum when it was established in 1998 and was instrumental in creating many of the first archives.

“I work with a great crew of people who are invested in West Orange County history, so we make sure that it’s gathered, preserved and presented in the best possible way,” Crescitelli said.

Appointments to make a donation or search the archives can be made by calling the WGHF at (407) 656-3244.

Courtesy photo

ONCE A STORYTELLER, ALWAYS A STORYTELLER
Crescitelli’s latest project is a collection of a different kind of history: that of his childhood in New York City’s Brooklyn borough.

“Around the Corner and Up the Block” contains more than a dozen anecdotes and short stories that shine a humorous light on his upbringing. This includes chapters on the cursing ice cream man, a full set of Chinarina sans the gravy boat, Our Lady with the painted crossed eyes and Cub Scout shenanigans.

“As soon as I could write, I always wrote stories,” Crescitelli said. “I used to write hard little soap operas about people in the family, cousins, aunts, horrible little stories, and I would share them with everyone. And then I started writing a newspaper — basically rag sheets — about people in the neighborhood. It was called The Brooklyn Gazette.”

As a teenager, he took writing courses in school, where he was told to “write about what you know.”

So he did. He began penning anecdotes about his Brooklyn experiences with friends and family in the neighborhood.

“As I got older, I started turning them into a short-story collection thinking maybe I could get published,” he said.

A few did see print, and he won a few short-story contests.

He continued writing throughout his life, making a promise to himself to one day publish his stories. With his 70th birthday approaching last December, Crescitelli set up a publishing company, Front Stoop Books, and put together 14 of his stories.

“The stories are autobiographical fiction,” he said. “The setting, the people are real, a lot of the incidents are real, but I used artistic license; you want to turn them into stories with an end.

“I’m very proud of the accomplishment,” he said. “A lot of people can relate — and not just people who grew up in Brooklyn but people who grew up in a neighborhood like that. … It’s just life experience.”

Crescitelli said his family members love the collection.

“They said, ‘We can hear your voice and … you really captured the spirit of the time,’” he said.

Perhaps the book’s best quote is on the back cover and belongs to his mother, who died in 2020 but read many of his stories through the years: “I just want everyone to know that I’m nothing like the mother in this book, for Christ’s sake!”

“Around the Corner and Up the Block” is available on Amazon and in the WGHF gift shop.

“The stories that are all stitched together that form your life as you read through them, I’m documenting my life; and that’s what we do here at the Winter Garden Heritage Center, which is document history,” Crescitelli said. “I get to talk to people one on one and write down their histories. As I’ve captured my memories and captured them in a book, I’m capturing the memories of the people here and capturing them in an archive.

“I’m privileged to do that,” he said.

When Crescitelli isn’t sharing local history or penning his personal history, he is engaged in an eclectic variety of activities that includes creating needlepoint landscapes, gardening, making his own pasta, studying foreign languages, and collecting Fiesta Dinnerware and vinyls of 1960s girl groups. He also is compiling more of his written stories for a second volume that will continue through the ’60s.