Leu Gardens Crowds: Business as Usual

Posted on by Thor

In 2017, Hurricane Irma blew through Central Florida blowing down a tree that damaged the roof of this historic Leu Garden Museum. The upper floors were water damaged. The historic museum has been closed for the past three years for restoration and repairs. At this time, there is no reopen date. The gardens however are open for business as usual.

While restaurants, bars, beaches, and Florida State Parks have been shut down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the City of Orlando has for some reason left Harry P. Leu Gardens open. The city said it will close all city-owned and operated
playgrounds and the swan boats at Lake Eola Park at 5 p.m. Monday 3/23/2020 until
further notice, but Leu Gardens continues to draw big crowds. Last weekend 400 to 500 people crushed into the gardens each day to escape cabin fever. The gardens have replaced Orlando’s sports stadiums for people to crowd together.

Leu Gardens volunteers and staff are working hard to wipe down the surfaces in the gift shop and entry hall but it is hard to keep up. It seems extreme to expect Garden staff to risk their lives in the face of a pandemic for the City of Orlando. Things might not be so bad if people were practicing social distancing, but they are not. As one expert said, “If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans
freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart,
epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.” It is human nature to want to hug and shake hands to greet friends, or to hold each other tight when grieving a loss.

“Our outdoor facilities, such as our city parks, Leu Gardens and
Dubsdread Golf Course are open to the public, but residents must follow
necessary social distancing measures while there,” said Karyn Barber, a
city spokeswoman. “We encourage residents to use these facilities
responsibly to get fresh air and exercise, which are important for
physical and mental health always, but especially during this uncertain
time.” I am left wondering, who enforces responsible social distancing? Does this responsibility fall on Leu Gardens staff?

Florida State Governor Ron DeSantis wants to avoid a state-wide lock down leaving local governments to decide what should close and what should remain open. DeSantis still believes targeting the counties hardest hit by the Covid-19 for the most extreme measures is the preferable path.

The Florida Department of Health said Monday 3/23/2020 that there are now 1,171 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Florida with 14 deaths. I put 14 caskets in my sketch in their honor. Stay home, Stay safe.

Harry P Leu Gardens House Museum

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Kathy Miller Patages organized Weekly Paint and Sketch, a local sketch group that held a sketch outing to Harry P Leu Gardens (1920 North Forest Avenue Orlando, FL), and I decided to stop out on this sunny hot day to sketch. I never did notice any other sketchers, but I focused on the task at hand to capture the historic home.

Harry P Leu Gardens is an amazing 50-acre botanical oasis minutes from Downtown
Orlando. Each garden is designed specifically to further their mission:
inspire visitors to appreciate and understand plants. The garden and
historical home were donated to the City of Orlando in 1961 by Mr. Harry
P. Leu and his wife, Mary Jane Leu.

The roof of the Leu Home was still covered with a blue tarp because a tree limb had crashed through the roof of the home during Hurricane Irma. I had helped Orange County Regional History Museum staff one day as they volunteered to help the Gardens move bedroom furniture in the upstairs bedroom, so that it would not be further damaged by the rain leaking through the roof. It was an easy enough task, but a drop in the bucket compared to all the damage done. The smell of wet mold already was prevalent upstairs. The home repairs had to wait while the damage repair in the garden kicked into high gear after the storm. The gardens lost 175 trees, mostly hickory and magnolias, to the storm. 100 volunteers and staff helped clear up the debris.

As of May 2018, Leu Gardens was still seeking contractors to do exterior repairs to the historic home. Needed were replacements of structural members, siding, re-roofing of all shingled areas and repainting of the structure. The Leu House Museum is a restored 19th century home that was added to
the National Register of Historic Places in December 1994. The museum
was closed because storm damage by Hurricane Irma and has since reopened, but repairs are ongoing.

Jessica Domingo Going Away Party

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Jessica Domingo joined the Orange County Regional History Center in the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting.She specifically joined the staff to help in cataloguing and preserving all of the memorial items collected from the Dr Phillips Center of the Performing Arts, Lake Eola and Pulse. This was a monumental task  since there were so many memorial items left and and the constant Florida rains, humidity and bugs made preserving the collection a challenge. She spent most of her time at the museum’s offsite storage facility which is in a huge warehouse.

When Hurricane Irma hit Orlando in 2017 as a category 2 storm, the warehouse roof was damaged when a rooftop access portal the size of a manhole cover was blown free and the heavy cover ripped holes in the flat roof. Unfortunate some Pulse memorial items were on the floor as they were being triaged for conservation and cataloging. Ceiling panels from the interior ceiling soaked up water leaking from the roof and fell to the floor exploding like wet bombs. Items on the floor got soaked. Pam Schwartz the museum head curator was on the scene shortly after the storm passed and assessed the damage. The staff was quickly called in to help clean up the damage. I was on site to help by making a pile of all the ceiling panels and debris  while leaving the artifacts for the museum staff to recover.

Water caused mold to build up inside the off site facilities walls and dehumidifiers were moved in and all the interior walls had to be replaced while protecting the collection with floor to ceiling plastic tarps. All of that is to say that Jessica’s job became all the more important after hurricane Irma. Conservation of memorial items did not include trying to flatten paper documents from water damage. The everyday Florida rains had already soaked and wrinkled any papers left at memorial sites. However mold could not be allowed to spread. Which reminds me I have a small pile of paintings and sketches which were also damaged by hurricane Irma. Water blew its way in through my downtown studio apartment windows soaking a small stack of art I had left near the window. I am sill debating if that work will end up in a landfill since it is damaged with black mold.

Jessica has family out west and her grandmother needed care so she decided she had to leave Orlando. A party was held at Pam Schwartz’s home. I sketched briefly between food and games. Whitney Broadaway‘s child had a game that everyone played, it involved a maze that kept moving making it a challenge for players to collect the items needed to win. I played a round after the sketch was put a side and it was a fun game.

After Hurricane Irma Jessica allowed Pam and myself to come over her place for a shower and a bit to eat.  It is when there is an emergency when true friend step up. Since moving Jessica had had a child herself. It is a shame that really good and talented friends keep getting pulled away from Orlando.

Daytona Beach Sand Dredging Project

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Pam Schwartz and I decided to get away to Daytona Beach for a day. Parking at the end of a street was surprisingly easy. A quick walk over some dunes left us on the beach where we set up the umbrella since I am a vampire needing eternal shade. Once set up we walked down the beach towards what looked like a huge fountain.

The beach ended with a sign and workmen warning “Danger and Keep Out!” The fountain was part of a  $20-million-plus effort to restore protective berms along Flagler
County’s coastline, one of the longest and most multifaceted projects in
the county’s history. Work crews dumped more than 750,000 tons of sand to patch up Flagler’s
battered dune line, which was devastated by hurricanes Matthew and Irma
in 2016 and 2017.

Sand was being pumped through huge pipes being moved from one area and mixed with sea water to make a slurry and then pumped out like a geyser onto the new beaches being built and expanded.  As the sand filled slurry poured out, tractors quickly moved up and down the beach moving the new sand into place. A few months later the same beach had a huge thick boa constrictor of a pipe running down the beach as the sand was being pumped further south. Sand was built up in certain areas so beach goers had bridges to walk over the thick pipe which was at least 5 feet in diameter.

Hurricane Irma rips into the Orange County Regional History Center’s Collection Facility

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After weathering Hurricane Irma, a category 2 hurricane, I helped Pam Schwartz to clean up all the broken tree limbs in her yard. Her property is gorgeously landscaped but that meant she had tons of fallen branches. The pile we built curbside was, and still is, 10 feet wide and as high as my hips. We bagged the smaller branches and those were picked up, but the rest of the debris is still on her lawn killing the grass, but providing home to many snakes. She was without power for the week.

We were exhausted from moving so much debris but late that afternoon she said she had to stop by the Orange County Regional History Center off-site facility. She just wanted to see that everything was OK. The plan was to do a quick check and then pick up some food. We hadn’t eaten all day, there was too much to do.

En route, my phone warned me that there was potential flooding. Within the next quarter mile, sure enough the road looked like a river. Her SUV made it through without a hitch. It was getting near sunset when we drove up to the facility. We were shocked by the view. The large parking lot in front of the building looked like a lake. We parked on the far side of the lake and took our shoes off to wade across. The water was up above my knees in the deepest section of the lot. In hind site we should have checked to be sure there were no downed power lines. Luckily we weren’t electrocuted.

The warehouse is a bit above the parking lot level and the front entry of the facility was clear with no water. Then we entered the conservation room where most of the work to preserve Pulse memorial items had been done. The ceiling panels were soaked, and several waterlogged panels had fallen to the floor. The panels must burst on impact under their own weight because shards were scattered everywhere. Pam groaned.

Pam is the chief curator of the Orange County Regional History Center. This is a curator’s worst nightmare, secondhand only to fire. With just two panels missing in the conservation room, the damage didn’t look too bad. Boxes on the floor had soaked up the water. Pam asked me to salvage a box of Pulse related archives, cards and notes of remembrance. I lifted the waterlogged box and then took all the papers and laid them out to dry in the break room. So much work had gone into preserving the memorial items from Pulse. They had been saved from the afternoon rainstorms that are consistent on any summer day in Orlando at the memorial sites. Now they needed to be saved once again.

After cleaning up much of the mess in the conservation room, Pam called me outside. A giant double rainbow now arched above the newly formed parking lot lake. Maybe things were looking up. Then, back inside, Pam opened up the double doors that lead into the main area of the storage facility. She let out a gasp. I couldn’t see around her. The damage wasn’t limited to the conservation room we had been working on. Ceiling panels had collapsed throughout the storage facility. Pam went into triage mode and my first assignment was to save the art which was below a fallen soaked panel. I found large tarps to cover the art as a short term solution. The point of the off-site facility is to maintain a museum standard of temperature and humidity. With the ceilings compromised everything was at risk.

For the rest of the night, I picked up ceiling panels and soaked insulation and made a debris pile in the loading dock area. The small mountain I built was about 10 feet in diameter and about 5 feet high. I decided not to touch any artifacts, I would leave that to the pros. For some reason I paused as I lifted a panel off of this large industrial lamp behind an old citrus ladder. The lamp was on a wooden skid which protected it from the water. Ironically the lamp was in the History Center’s Reflections magazine that just came out this week. The new acquisition was donated by Tom Bessa and is from McCoy Air Force Base. It dates back to the 1950s and a workman removing the item offered it to Bessa. Now it is part of Orlando’s History. Every item in the storage facility has a similar personal story.

Pam called her entire collections staff that night to help get the facility under control. Thank goodness Joe Austin sent snacks for us with Jessica Domingo, by that time Pam and I were running on fumes. Anything on the floor was at risk of water damage. Water was still dripping from every open ceiling panel. I cleared a walkway so the staff could move items from the collection to dryer ground.

We later learned that a metal roof access hatch had blown off and the hurricane force winds had propelled it over the roof. Each time the hatch crashed down it ripped a hole in the roof’s covering.  From there, the water dripped down into the insulation and ceiling panels which would crash down from the weight. Large puddles of water were everywhere. By the end of the night most of the museum artifacts had been moved away from collapsed panels. Much of the Pulse collection was in the worst affected areas, so the need to act with speed was critical with already compromised artifacts.

All of the water has now been removed from the floor and a small army of about a dozen humidifiers is working around the clock to remove moisture from the air. The interior walls that touch the floor all developed mold in their inner cavities. Simply put, black mold isn’t good when you are hoping to preserve historic artifacts. The lower drywall panels were removed from all the affected walls. Plastic encapsulations now separate the spaces with zippers allowing access between rooms. The plastic is intended to protect the collection as workers reinstall drywall and to assist in regulation/stabilization of temperature and humidity. Work is now under way to repair the walls, the ceiling tiles and insulation have been replaced. Conservation is still ongoing to restore any artifacts that suffered from water damage, but every single item of the few thousand affected artifacts were saved. The incredibly fast response of the core collections staff of the History Center helped avert what could have been a much bigger tragedy. With the lessons learned from this disaster, they are offering advice to Leu Gardens Historic Home, which suffered damage after a tree fell on the roof of the home.

P.S. These sketches were created post-event from my photographs. This is an anomaly as that is not the way I tend to work. However, this wasn’t the time to sit down and create art.

The Ultimate Art Project

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Tamera J. Rogers made me aware of The Ultimate Art Project which was slated to happen days after Hurricane Irma struck Florida. This program was planned for the Square in Downtown Tavares, America’s Sea Plane City.It was an opportunity to catch artists in their moments of creative glory. There were to be actors, painters and singers and potters and poets and
jewelers and dancers, sculptors, and weavers and crafters, musicians and
magicians and libations and food.

I decided to make the event one of the locations for the 10 Urban Sketching Workshops I have been offering. This was the 5th workshop. Progressing from small stories to medium stories and ultimately big stories.  Pam Schwartz and I took the one hour drive to sketch the Ultimate Art Project. The sun was setting as we approached the town square. The event was easy to find because of all the white events tents.

The grassy area was about the size of half a football field surrounded by wrought iron fences. The first tend we saw had kids doing four inch square paintings. In a corner of the field was Karaoke which dominated sound scene. Mixed in was a pan flutist, in the center of the field. One lady stood listening and then chatted with him. I decided he wasn’t a sketch option since she was keeping him from performing. A van was painted black like a chalkboard and people could do chalk drawings on the vehicle. This is a pretty awesome idea and I wouldn’t mind setting up mu Prius as a chalk board. There
was the option to take a selfie in “paintings” of the Mona Lisa, The
Scream, American Gothic, and Girl with a Pearl Earring but we never got around to taking those selfies.

I stopped when I heard this father (James Whitehead) and daughter team singing in the artists tent. They referred to themselves as Southern Roots. She had an amazing voice. They were strictly acoustic so their music had to blend in with the karaoke and Pan pipes across the way. Dad explained to me that his daughter really had to stress her voice to be heard. He was afraid she might not perform her best at next weeks church service. The set abruptly ended when the free movie screening began of Woody Allen’s

Midnight in Paris.

Conversations among the artists were mostly about the recent hurricane. The Tavares marina was destroyed by Irma and all the boats piled up by the high winds. Sections of the park were cordoned off due to hurricane damage. The Ultimate Art Project was a chance for the community to get out after the hurricane and have a relaxing evening on the town green.

Hurricane damage in Greenwood Cemetery.

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I drive by Greenwood Cemetery almost daily and after Hurricane Irma I was amazed at the amount of tree damage there was in the cemetery. I decided to return to document some of the trees that had snapped like twigs. The first stop was to the four headstones for victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre. This area of the cemetery had been largely spared. As a matter of fact one stone had rainbow balloons, rainbow flowers, a pin wheel and a rainbow colored teddy bear. All the memorial items were pristine. The day before had been Leroy Valentín Fernández‘ birthday. Clearly the family had come out and colorfully decorated his headstone to mark the occasion. All of the Pulse victim headstones now had color photos that were laminated in plastic and cut into the headstones. The photo of Cory Connell was had outstretched arms as if he were ready to wrestle the world. All memorial items had been removed form his stone, probably in preparation for Hurricane Irma. All 4 stone sat quietly in the shade of a large tree that had weathered the storm fine.

Pam Schwartz and I searched the cemetery for the tree I had seen while driving by the cemetery. Blanche Crews headstone
was knocked over by a fallen tree limb. It was wedged back up with
fallen branches making it look like the fallen angels had crutches.  Dozens of trees had snapped and branches littered the entire cemetery making it appear wild and overgrown. I settled into a spot near the headstone of Edgar Earl Hitchcock. I of course wondered if he was related to the film maker. Pam quickly did research and found out that Edgar was an important figure in Orlando’s medical history. He founded the Pediatric Associates of Orlando in 1939. He was shown in a photo giving the very first polio vaccine shot in Central Florida to a young boy. His wife Ruth died many years after him but her headstone was not in her family plot or perhaps there is just no headstone.

Across the lane from where I was sketching, a family arrived in several cars. Blue and white helium balloons bounced up out of the car behind them. They were visiting the headstone of Richard Marcano Trinidad who had died on August 19, 2016. He had died at the tender age of 36. His stone noted that he was a Stealers fan and the epitaph read…”For the best daddy in the world. We will never forget you…from your kids.” An Orlando Sentinel article reported that police had been dispatched to a home near UCF, where they found Trinidad critically injured. His 36 year old girlfriend was on the scene. I could not find any further reports about how or why Richard had died. The family released the dozen or so blue and white balloons and they silently rose into the sky.

Near the fallen tree I was sketching was the headstone for Harry P. Leu (1884-1977) and his wife Mary (1903-1986) of Leu Gardens fame. Their two granite slabs lying side by side, were pristine except for a few leaves. The Harry P. Leu historic home however has suffered damage from a huge tree limb that crashed into the roof, exposing the Leu bedroom to rain and wind damage. The ceilings and floor boards are soaked. Leu Gardens has closed indefinitely. Pam Schwartz, the Orange County Regional History Center curator went to the historic home to offer advice on preservation societies who might be able to help as well as FEMA contacts. 

The History Center off site storage facility had suffered damage when a roof access panel was blown loose and it gouged holes in the roofing as the heavy metal lid was hurled by the high winds, causing leaks over the historic collection. I was with Pam when she found the soaked warehouse and helped in removing soaked ceiling panels and now useless archival cardboard boxes. It look hours of work and in the emergency the sketchbook was ignored. Even though the floor were dried and artifacts were lifted to be  dried out off the floor, it was then discovered that the walls of the warehouse are fulled with mold. Now an effort needs to be made to save the collection form that mold which is inside the walls up to 10 feet high. The History Center is replacing all the inner walls in an effort to  protect and preserve Orlando’s History.

Weathering Hurricane Irma.

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I spent all morning looking for a coffee house with Wi Fi. My apartment has no power. I tried Stardust Video and Coffee first. A staff member was dumping water out the front door using a plastic trash pail. He let me know that Stardust was without power. A crew was cutting up a fallen Live Oak across the street. I tried Drunken Monkey next. The parking lot was full. I parked a few blocks away and walked in. There was a huge line for coffee. Nicki Drumb, who got an awesome grant to help create “Moving Art“ on Orlando’s Sun Rail, had her cup of coffee and gave me a hug in line. She let know that the Monkey had no Wi Fi. Ugh, I groaned. Next I tried the Orlando Public Library which had bombastic music piped in at the entrance. Unfortunately the library was closed. 

At this point I gave up my quest for a digital connection. Instead I sketched this fallen tree near my apartment. The neighborhood was coming alive with people walking their dogs to get out after being cooped up for several days because of Hurricane Irma. Baby Blue , the owner of the Venue stopped her car and asked me if I needed anything from my curbside sketching perch. A neighbor who was also out of power stopped to see my sketch and we chatted for a moment. It is amazing how catastrophe helps bring a community together. With my sketch done, I drove up to Winter Park, because The re was a rumor that Austin’s Coffee (929 West Fairbanks Road Orlando FL) was open and it had Wi Fi. Behind the counter the Batista’s mused,”We got Nihilism, we got musings in cool places,We got bad attitudes, oh and we got power.”  With an ice cold Yak and a Portabella Mushroom sandwich, I finally settled in to write this article.

The night before, power flickered off just as Pam Schwartz pulled a hot home made pizza out of the oven. We played cards by candle light as the winds picked up outside. I followed the eye of the four hundred mile wide storm on the radar app on my phone. South West coast of Florida as a category four Hurricane and it crept north at 15 miles per hour. The winds blew objects which rolled and scraped over the roof. The sky flashed a mysterious vibrant blue. Emergency vehicle lights strobbed and illuminated the trees a blood red. Something banged at the front and back of the house. Several intense wind bursts made it seem like The roof might lift.

The next morning clean up began. It seemed like half of the tree limbs had snapped off of the tree. Curb side piles grew to fortress proportions. Large trees were down in the neighborhood. With yard work out of the way curator Pam Schwartz and I drove south to check on the warehouse where the Orange County History Center‘s off site storage facility is housed. What we found was shocking and unexpected. A huge double rainbow spanned the horizon opposite the setting sun over the huge warehouse parking lot which was now a lake which was thigh deep.