Live in Lafayette Park

Lafayette Park is ground from the township Congress granted the Marquis de Lafayette in 1824, as the neighborhood association's history tells it. Around 1900 the land was cut into large tracts, and the Beards and the Harberts who owned some of them gave the streets their names. Between 1911, when the triangular Eastview Addition was platted along Miccosukee Road, and 1940, local businessmen platted thirteen subdivisions from the pastures and orchards. The houses went up mostly from the late 1920s, and the association lists what stands: Craftsman bungalows, English, Colonial and Mediterranean Revival, and frame and brick vernacular, more than 500 structures in all.

The park is the reason for the name. On 4 May 1932 the City bought about 22 acres of the Meridian Heights subdivision. The Garden Club wanted to call it the Botanical Gardens, and in 1934 the Tallahassee Historical Society had it named for Lafayette instead. In 1957 the City built its first multi-purpose community center there. Sue Herndon McCollum ran it in the 1960s and started Playcamp in 1966, still the City's oldest fee-based camp, and the building has carried her name since 2006.

The line on this page is the association's. The guide is the Lafayette Park Neighborhood Association's area as Tallahassee-Leon County GIS maps it, clipped to the City limits: 182 acres between North Gadsden Street, East 6th Avenue and Miccosukee Road. Inside it the 2020 census counted 1,154 residents in 669 housing units, 1.72 to a home, with no block that looks like a dormitory. Florida State's campus is 1.4 km away, and the census tract that holds the whole guide counts 14.2% of its residents in college or graduate school, 395 of them graduate students, plus or minus 206. No source gives the neighborhood's own share.

What sells it is three schools inside a kilometer. Every resident of 2020, about 1,150 people, was in the 2026-27 zones of Sullivan Elementary on Miccosukee Road, Cobb Middle on Hillcrest Street and Leon High on East Tennessee Street, 0.65, 0.48 and 0.79 km from the reference point, graded B, A and B by the state for 2026. Midtown's bars and restaurants are next door, and the pressure shows: in Tallahassee Magazine's 2019 portrait the association's president described larger lots being subdivided and houses torn down to build anew. No public source publishes a sale price for the neighborhood. Zillow's typical value for ZIP code 32303, which holds most of it, was $239,971 in August 2026, across 48,644 people and every kind of home.

The costs are the City's, and the flood map is clean. No resident in 2020 lived on a block in a FEMA flood zone, and the reference point is zone X on a 2009 panel, though FEMA's map is not the whole of the risk, so ask for a flood quote at the address. Taxes are 19.2060 mills for 2025, so $1,920.60 a year on each $100,000 of taxable value. Homestead takes $25,000 off every levy and a second $25,000 off all but the school levies, and Save Our Homes holds a homestead's assessment to 3% a year until it sells, so the seller's bill understates yours. Stormwater ($11.00 a month) and garbage ($28.19) come on the City utility bill, beside a fire services fee this site could not read, under a lawsuit filed on 17 November 2025. The Gulf bus stops on Miccosukee Road about once an hour at midday.