Live in Delaney Park
Big pre-war houses on brick streets in the Blankner and Boone catchment, and the 2025 roll puts the median one at $640,275.
Delaney Park is neighborhood 19 on the City of Orlando's layer, about 180 acres between Delaney Avenue and the Lake Lancaster shore, south of the East-West Expressway and north of Kaley Street. It is almost entirely houses: 441 of the 474 parcels on the 2025 state assessment roll are single-family, which is 93 percent, and they are old and large by central Florida standards. The median actual year built is 1949, 16 percent date from the 1920s, the median living area is 2,277 square feet and the median just value is $640,275. Two things are worth settling before an offer. The Blankner and Boone assignment that most of the price rests on is shared with Wadeview Park immediately south, where the roll puts the median house at $407,190, and the brick streets are not all visible, because most of Osceola Avenue through here is blacktop laid over its original brick. Only a strip about one lot deep on the east side of Delaney Avenue, roughly 3 percent of the neighborhood, sits inside the Lake Copeland local historic district. Everything else carries no design review at all.
The old houses south of the expressway, and what they cost
Neighborhood 19 on the City of Orlando's political neighborhoods layer, about 180 acres: Delaney Avenue on the west, East Gore Street on the north, East Kaley Street on the south, and the Lake Lancaster shore with Briercliff Drive, Lancaster Drive and Austin Road on the east.
Delaney Park is neighborhood 19 on the City of Orlando's own layer, about 180 acres running from Delaney Avenue east to the Lake Lancaster shore, with Gore Street at the top and Kaley Street at the bottom. It is a rare thing in this metro: an almost entirely residential piece of the inner city. Of the 474 parcels on the 2025 state assessment roll, 441 are single-family, which is 93 percent. The park at its middle was called Duckworth until the city renamed it in 1959, and its 7.25 acres of ball fields and tennis courts still have no outdoor lights, so everything there ends at dusk.
The houses are old and unusually large. The median single-family parcel here has an actual year built of 1949 and a median living area of 2,277 square feet. Sixteen percent date from the 1920s and another 22 percent from the 1940s. The roll puts the median just value at $640,275, with a quarter of the stock above $885,000. Nothing about that is cheap, and it is worth being precise about what the money buys.
It is not buying an exclusive school catchment, because the catchment is shared. On Orange County's 2026-27 attendance zones this neighborhood goes to Blankner School for kindergarten through eighth grade and to Boone High School after that. So does Wadeview Park, immediately south across Kaley Street, where the same query against the same roll returns a median just value of $407,190. The gap is roughly $233,000 for identical school assignments, and what it pays for is the house and the street: 2,277 square feet against 1,564, on eight-thousand-square-foot lots under mature oaks.
The brick streets are real and they are not all visible. Orlando has more than 57 miles of brick-surfaced street, and this neighborhood carries a good share of it, but most of Osceola Avenue through here is asphalt laid over the original brick, as are most of Fern Creek and most of South Summerlin. Delaney Avenue itself is covered and is due to be restored once the utility lines beneath it are replaced. A 1996 study in Winter Park found brick cut average speeds from 41 mph to 29 and lifted nearby property values by 15 to 25 percent, which is the argument for restoring them rather than resurfacing. Walk the specific block before you decide what you are buying.
Almost none of this neighborhood is under design review. The city has six local historic districts, and only one of them reaches here: the Lake Copeland district crosses Delaney Avenue and takes in a strip about one lot deep on its eastern side, roughly 3 percent of the neighborhood. Inside that strip, changes to a structure go to the Historic Preservation Board. Outside it, which is the other 97 percent, they do not, so a 1926 bungalow next door to a protected one can be extended, re-clad or replaced on ordinary zoning rules. The rest is ordinary central Florida: 18.0878 mills on a City of Orlando address for the 2025 tax year, no community development district on ground this old, an 86.5-foot USGS elevation forty miles inland, and 80 percent of the houses already standing in 1994, well ahead of the statewide wind code of 2002. Orlando Health's downtown campus sits a mile west and rebuilt its emergency department in 2025, which is a reason people move here and a reason for the traffic on Orange Avenue.
- Check whether the address is inside the Lake Copeland historic district. About 3 percent of this neighborhood is, and the rest has no design review
- Compare the block against Wadeview Park south of Kaley Street. The school zones are the same and the median just value is $233,000 lower
- Walk the street. Osceola Avenue and Delaney Avenue are brick under asphalt here, not brick you can see
- Get a wind mitigation report. Four fifths of these houses were standing in 1994, well ahead of the statewide wind code of 2002
- Budget for the oaks. They are the reason the streets look like this and they are a standing cost
- Ask what the hospital campus sounds like at night before you buy on the western blocks
How Delaney Park got here
- 1920sThe first wave of building south of downtown. Sixteen percent of the single-family houses standing inside the boundary today date from this decade.
- 1940sA larger second wave adds another 22 percent of the surviving stock, and pulls the median year built to 1949.
- 1959The city renames Duckworth Park, one of its oldest, as Delaney Park: 7.25 acres of ball fields, tennis courts and playgrounds on Delaney Avenue.
- 2002The Florida Building Code takes effect statewide on 1 March, replacing the county codes. Eighty percent of the houses inside this boundary were already standing in 1994, so they predate it comfortably.
- 2025Orlando Health opens a rebuilt emergency department at its downtown campus a mile west, a $25 million project that more than doubles a trauma bay built for 1,000 patients a year and now seeing more than 5,100.
- 2026Most of Osceola Avenue through the neighborhood is still blacktop over its original brick, and Delaney Avenue is due to be restored to brick once the utility lines beneath it have been replaced.
Delaney Park and the Lake Lancaster streets
Delaney Park is 7.25 acres on Delaney Avenue, one of the oldest parks the city has, with baseball and softball fields, hard tennis courts, two playgrounds split by age and picnic ground under oaks. It has no outdoor lighting, which is the single most useful thing to know about it. On the eastern boundary, Lake Lancaster is ringed by Lancaster Drive and Briercliff Drive, and those streets are the running loop people here actually use. Lake Copeland sits just over Delaney Avenue to the west.
What the map does not show: a park with no lights in a city where it is 33 °C until seven in the evening means the fields are unusable for much of the summer after work. The lake streets fill in the gap, and they are pavement rather than a path.
Elsewhere in Orlando, not Delaney 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. The reference point falls at Delaney Park itself, so the park reads as a rounding error rather than a distance.
Every gym within reach
The provision here is municipal rather than commercial. Delaney Park has the fields and the courts, the Lake Lancaster streets carry the running, and the city pool at Wadeview is a few minutes south. Private gyms are on Orange Avenue in SoDo rather than inside the neighborhood.
- Baseball and softball fields, hard tennis courts and two playgrounds, all inside the neighborhood
- No outdoor lights, so summer evenings are shorter here than the temperature suggests
- The streets around Lake Lancaster are the shaded running loop
- Wadeview Pool, south past Kaley Street, is the nearest public swimming
| Facility | What it is | Drive |
|---|---|---|
| Delaney Park open | Ball fields, hard tennis courts, two playgrounds and open ground under oaks, 7.25 acres of it inside the neighborhood. There are no outdoor lights, so everything here stops at dusk. | 2–3 min |
| Lake Lancaster open | The residential streets around the lake on the eastern boundary, which is what people here actually run. Pavement rather than a path, and shaded most of the way. | 2–3 min |
| Wadeview Pool open | The city pool and neighborhood center on South Summerlin Avenue, south past Kaley Street, and the nearest public swimming that is not somebody's garden. | 4–5 min |
The free option is the park and the lake streets, and between June and September both work before about nine in the morning and after about seven at night.
Blankner and Boone, and the price that rests on them
Orange County Public Schools assigns by home address across the whole county. On the 2026-27 zones this neighborhood goes to Blankner School, which runs K-8 so there is no separate middle school step, and then to Boone High School on Kaley Street. The district also runs magnet and choice programs, among them the School of Arts & Entertainment at Cherokee in the old school building just north of Gore Street.
| School | Board | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Blankner School | Orange County Public Schools | The zoned school for this neighborhood on the district's 2026-27 attendance zones. It runs kindergarten through eighth grade, so there is no separate middle school assignment here. |
| Boone High School | Orange County Public Schools | The zoned high school on the 2026-27 zones, a mile south on Kaley Street. Together with Blankner it is most of what the price premium over the neighborhoods south and east is buying. |
| School of Arts & Entertainment at Cherokee | Orange County Public Schools | An arts and technology high school in the old Cherokee School building just north of the neighborhood. It is a choice program, so a place is applied for rather than assigned by address. |
| Orange County's magnet and choice programs | Orange County Public Schools | Magnet and choice programs run county-wide alongside assignment, with an application window. Apply in the window rather than assuming the catchment is the whole answer. |
| The district's own boundary lookup | Orange County Public Schools | Blankner and Boone are both popular and both crowded, and Orange County redraws zones as enrollment moves. Check the specific address in the district's lookup, and check it again for the year your child would start. |
Both assigned schools are popular, both are crowded, and Orange County redraws zones as enrollment moves. Check the specific address in the district's own boundary lookup before you offer, and check it again for the year your child would actually start.
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 brick streets and the oak canopy are the whole argument for the neighborhood, and this is when you feel it
- Peak visitor season, and the hospital campus traffic on Orange Avenue is unaffected by any of it
- The driest month on average and the best for anything outdoors
- The ball fields at Delaney Park are in use until dusk, which is when they stop
- A good month to walk Osceola Avenue and see where the blacktop over the brick has worn through
- Warming into the high twenties, with humidity back before the month ends
- Spring break puts the metro's heaviest visitor traffic on the roads
- Oak pollen is at its worst, and there are a great many oaks here
- Warm, still mostly dry, and the last month before the air changes
- Insurance renewals cluster ahead of hurricane season
- Eighty percent of the houses here were built before 1994, well ahead of the statewide wind code of 2002, so the wind mitigation report is the document that moves the premium
- The rainy season usually begins in the second half of the month
- Afternoon thunderstorms become a daily fixture
- 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 heat with the humidity on top
- Mature oaks over 1920s and 1940s roofs are the risk here, not water
- The hottest and wettest month, and life moves to early morning and after dark
- The park empties between about ten and six
- Cooling 2,277 square feet of pre-war house is the largest single number on the utility bill
- Peak humidity and the start of the serious part of hurricane season
- School starts, and the Kaley Street and Delaney Avenue traffic changes shape with it
- Tree work is cheaper booked now than after a storm has chosen for you
- 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 surge 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 for the park and the lake streets
- Hurricane season ends on 30 November and the dry season starts
- Comfortable enough to be outside all day again
- The tax bill arrives, with the 18.0878 mills on it and any non-ad-valorem assessments underneath
- Warm days, cool evenings and almost no rain
- Downtown fills for the season and this is a short drive from the middle of it
- The pay-off for August
Every photograph in this guide's library is above
This library holds one photograph and the page has already printed it. The credits are in the footer.
About these photographs. Openly licensed images geotagged in or near Delaney Park, found on Wikimedia Commons and served from there with full attribution. Inline photos elsewhere on the page may still come from the site's shared Orlando library.