Linton E. Allen Memorial Fountain

This guide traces how Orlando's lakefront fountain nearly never got built, when construction crews struck an eighty-foot sinkhole right where it was supposed to stand. It follows Linton Allen, a small-town banker who came home from postwar Europe convinced Orlando needed a fountain of its own, and the engineering scramble of steel cylinders and concrete that saved his plan. The crowd that gathered on the shore for its 1957 debut is best pictured from the same spot where you're standing now.