Live in Audubon Park
A 1950s subdivision built for the airmen and sailors next door, with the food street the rest of the city drives to along its northern edge.
Audubon Park is 351 acres of bird-named streets on the east side, laid out in the 1950s and 1960s to house families from the Orlando Air Force Base and the Naval Training Center that followed it. The base is gone, the payroll left with it, and what the neighborhood has instead is Corrine Drive: a two-lane commercial street that the City designated as the Audubon Park Garden District under the Orlando Main Streets program, and that now carries East End Market, the food hall at 3201 Corrine Drive that made the street a destination. Two things a buyer should get straight before making an offer. The City's Audubon Park and the Audubon Park Garden District are different boundaries drawn for different purposes, and the houses are post-war ranches, which means slab construction, original 1950s wiring in places, and a roof that predates every wind code an insurer cares about. At a USGS-measured 113.1 feet, the coastal storm-surge question that organizes this site's Miami and Tampa pages does not reach here at all.
The base left, the shopping street stayed
East of downtown between North Bumby Avenue and Bennett Road, with Corrine Drive along the northern edge and the interior streets running south past Lake Druid toward Lawton Road.
Audubon Park is 351 acres of bird-named streets, laid out in the 1950s and 1960s to house families from the military base next door. The Orlando Army Air Base of 1940 became Orlando Air Force Base, the Air Force handed it to the Navy in 1968, and the Naval Training Center trained sailors here until the 1993 closure round shut it down. Chelsea Street, Falcon Drive, Ibis, Pelican and Tanager were built for that payroll, and the payroll is gone.
What replaced it is a shopping street. Corrine Drive runs along the northern edge of the neighborhood and is the reason people who do not live here know the name at all. The City created the Orlando Main Streets program in 2008 and the merchants along the road organized as the Audubon Park Garden District, one of twelve designated districts. In 2013 East End Market opened in a converted church at 3201 Corrine Drive with about a dozen small merchants and an incubator kitchen in it, and the street stopped being a strip of tire shops and vintage stores and became somewhere people drive to on a Saturday.
Two boundaries share this name and they are not the same boundary. The City maps Audubon Park as neighborhood 3 in its political neighborhoods layer, running between North Bumby Avenue and Bennett Road with Corrine Drive on the north. The Audubon Park Garden District is a business district clustered on the road itself and drawn for a different purpose. An address can sit in one and not the other, which matters when a listing says Audubon Park and means the restaurants rather than the streets. Nobody publishes a population or a median price for either one: the Census Bureau reports the city and its tracts, not the City's neighborhoods, so a neighborhood-level number in a listing came from somewhere other than the Bureau.
The house is what you are actually buying, and it is a post-war house. Concrete block on a slab, low pitch, original ductwork in some of them, and a roof structure that predates Florida's statewide building code, which took effect in 2002. Florida insurers price that directly. A wind mitigation report will move a quote here further than the offer price does, and on a 1950s ranch it is the first thing to commission, not the last. Sewer and electrical panels are the other two: this stock is old enough that a 2026 renovation and a 1958 service panel often live in the same building.
The compensation is position. At a USGS-measured 113.1 feet the surge argument that runs through this site's Miami and Tampa pages does not apply, the airport is under half an hour, and the schools are the ones Winter Park families are also assigned to. See the Orlando hub for how the tax bill is built.
- Commission a wind mitigation report before offering; on a 1950s roof it moves the premium more than the price does
- Ask whether the address is in the City's Audubon Park, in the Garden District, or in both. They are different lines
- Check the electrical panel and the sewer lateral. Post-war stock here is routinely renovated above and original below
- There is no community development district and no association on most of these streets, so the tax bill is the millage and nothing else
- Corrine Drive is the asset and the traffic. Walk the block you are buying on at six in the evening
- Confirm the school assignment for the specific address rather than the neighborhood, because the middle grades split here
How Audubon Park got here
- 1940The Orlando Army Air Base opens north-east of here as a wartime training field, and the east side of the city starts building for it.
- 1950sDevelopers lay out Audubon Park between Bumby Avenue and Bennett Road, naming the streets after birds and selling to base families. Sorenson and Fletcher build the first houses on Chelsea Street and Falcon Drive.
- 1968The Air Force base becomes the Naval Training Center Orlando, and the neighborhood keeps its military customer for another generation.
- 1993The Naval Training Center is selected for closure under the Base Realignment and Closure process. The payroll Audubon Park was built around goes away.
- 2008The City creates Orlando Main Streets, and the Corrine Drive merchants organize as the Audubon Park Garden District.
- 2013East End Market opens in a converted church at 3201 Corrine Drive, and the street's reputation as a food destination dates from it.
- 2010sBaldwin Park finishes building out on the old base immediately east, and Corrine Drive inherits a new set of customers who can walk or ride to it.
Blue Jacket Park, Lake Druid and the Cady Way Trail
The open space here is inherited from the base. Blue Jacket Park north-east of the neighborhood is the old drill field, now playing fields and paths. Lake Druid Park sits on the neighborhood's own south-western corner on land that was also part of the installation. The Cady Way Trail, a paved rail trail running toward Winter Park, is the only continuous route out of here that does not involve a road, and Leu Gardens, the City's botanical garden on Lake Rowena, is a few minutes west along Corrine Drive.
What the map does not show: the canopy on these streets is mature enough to change what the summer feels like and mature enough to drop limbs in a July storm. Tree work is an annual line item here, not an emergency, and the neighborhood's National Wildlife Federation habitat designation is a description of how people garden rather than a rule about what they may plant.
Elsewhere in Orlando, not Audubon Park
21 places, with real drive times
Road-adjusted distance and drive time from the centre of the community to each destination, nearest first. Filter by category.
Showing 1–12 of 21 places, nearest first.
Method: distances and drive times are computed from a representative point in the neighborhood, using straight-line distance multiplied by a road factor and a tiered speed model: honest ranges, not routed times. Note that the 408 expressway is close enough to shorten the downtown run and far enough not to be heard from most of these streets.
Every gym within reach
There is no anchor gym in the neighborhood. What there is instead is a park on an old parade ground, a lake loop next door and a rail trail, which is more than most of central Florida gets. Commercial studios cluster on Corrine Drive and along Bumby.
- Open fields, paths and youth sports on the old base grounds, a few minutes north-east
- The Lake Baldwin loop in Baldwin Park is the default run and is about four kilometers around
- The Cady Way Trail is paved and continuous, which is the rare thing here
- Lake Druid Park is the short version, at the neighborhood's own corner
| Facility | What it is | Drive |
|---|---|---|
| Blue Jacket Park open | The old base drill field, now playing fields, a walking loop and the closest thing this side of the city has to a track. | 4–6 min |
| Cady Way Trail open | The paved rail trail that runs north-east toward Winter Park, and the only continuous car-free route out of the neighborhood. | 4–6 min |
| Lake Baldwin open | The lake path in Baldwin Park next door, and the run most people here default to. | 6–9 min |
| Lake Druid Park open | The small lake park at the neighborhood's own corner, with a short loop and open ground. | 3–5 min |
The free option is the trail and the two lake loops. From October to May they are the reason people here own bicycles; from June to September they are an early-morning proposition and nothing else.
A K-8 inside the neighborhood, and a high school in another city
Audubon Park School runs kindergarten through eighth grade inside the neighborhood, which is unusual in central Florida and is part of what the addresses here are worth. Most of the area is then assigned to Winter Park High School, in a separate municipality but the same county district, and some addresses on this side feed Glenridge Middle rather than Audubon Park's own middle grades. Orange County Public Schools runs magnet and choice programs county-wide alongside assignment.
| School | Board | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Audubon Park School | Orange County Public Schools | A kindergarten through eighth grade school inside the neighborhood, which is unusual in central Florida and is part of what people pay for here. |
| Glenridge Middle School | Orange County Public Schools | The middle school in Winter Park. Whether a given address feeds Audubon Park's own middle grades or Glenridge is an address question, not a neighborhood one. |
| Winter Park High School | Orange County Public Schools | The assigned high school for most of this area. Winter Park is a separate municipality and the same county district, so the city line does not move the assignment. |
| Orange County's choice program | Orange County Public Schools | Magnet and choice programs run county-wide alongside assignment, with their own application window. |
| Independent schools | Independent | Winter Park and Maitland to the north hold the metro's largest concentration of independent schools, which is part of why families look at this side of the city. |
The city line does not move the assignment, because the district is county-wide, and the catchment boundaries do not follow the neighborhood boundary either. Check the specific address in the district's zone lookup before you rely on any of this.
Month by month, what living here looks like
Not a highlights reel: the actual annual rhythm, including the dates residents have to remember.
- Highs around 22 °C and lows near 10, the coolest and driest stretch of the year
- The month to walk Corrine Drive rather than drive four blocks of it
- Peak visitor season, and traffic on I-4 and the 408 to match
- The driest month on average, and the best for anything outdoors
- Blue Jacket Park fills with youth sports every weekend
- Comfortable enough to be outside at midday, which stops being true in April
- Warming into the high twenties, with humidity coming back late in the month
- Spring break brings the metro's heaviest visitor traffic of the year
- Oak pollen is at its worst, and these streets have a lot of oaks
- Warm and still mostly dry, the last month before the air changes
- Insurance renewals cluster ahead of hurricane season
- Get a wind mitigation report; on a 1950s roof it moves the premium more than anything else you can do
- The rainy season usually begins in the second half of the month
- Afternoon thunderstorms become a daily fixture rather than an event
- Central Florida is the most lightning-prone region in the United States
- Atlantic hurricane season runs 1 June to 30 November
- Daily storms, and mid-thirties once the humidity is counted
- Limbs come down on these streets in summer storms, so budget for tree work every spring
- The hottest and wettest month, and outdoor life moves to early morning and after dark
- The Corrine Drive patios are empty at two in the afternoon and full at eight
- Storms are reliable enough in their timing to plan a day around
- Peak humidity, and the start of the serious part of hurricane season
- School starts mid-month and the Corrine Drive traffic pattern changes with it
- At 113 feet, what you are watching for is wind and rainfall, not surge
- Statistically the peak of Atlantic hurricane activity
- Binding restrictions mean you often cannot buy a new policy with a named storm in the basin
- Hurricane Charley crossing the city in 2004 is the local reference, not a coastal event
- The rains taper off and the humidity finally breaks
- Still hurricane season, and October storms have crossed the peninsula before
- The best month of the year to be on the Cady Way Trail
- Hurricane season ends on 30 November and the dry season starts
- Comfortable enough to be outside all day again
- Snowbird traffic returns and the metro fills back up
- Warm days, cool evenings and almost no rain
- Peak season proper, and the parks are full
- The pay-off for August
14 more photographs of Orlando and the region
Drawn from the site's shared, freely licensed Orlando photo library, not photographs of Audubon Park itself. Filter by category.
Showing 1–12 of 14 photographs.
About these photographs. Openly licensed images from the site's shared Orlando library, found on Wikimedia Commons and served from there with full attribution. None of them is presented as a photograph of Audubon Park.