Exterior cleaning in Winter Haven
Winter Haven calls itself the Chain of Lakes City, and that is what shapes the exterior work here: the City counts fifty lakes within or bordering city limits, so the water is often behind the property, beside it or across the road, and the ground between those lakes was cut into navigable canals to promote commerce. The housing is not Lakeland's either. The Census puts 65.6 percent of Winter Haven's housing units in the single-family detached column, against 49.3 percent in Lakeland, and 6.2 percent are mobile homes, against 19.6 percent across Polk County. The median Winter Haven home was built in 1990, give or take three years, where Lakeland's median is 1983.
Nineteen lakes, fifty lakes, twenty-one canals
The counts differ because each body counts something different, so whose number it is matters. SWFWMD describes the Winter Haven Chain of Lakes as nineteen interconnected lakes, five in the northern chain and fourteen in the southern. The City puts the number at fifty within or bordering city limits, made up primarily of the Chain — eight lakes north, fourteen south — plus thirteen more public lakes it describes as not connected for navigation. That connection was dug, not grown: SWFWMD's management plan records that most of the lakes occupied individual basins before the canals were built. The canals belong to the Lake Region Lakes Management District, an independent special taxing district established in 1919 by a special act of the Florida Legislature, and its figures are district figures rather than city ones — across roughly fifty-three square miles it lists twenty-one navigable canals, and says it designs, builds and maintains its own docks, boat ramps and seawalls. Which adds up to an unusual amount of structure sitting right at the waterline. Interlaken is the plainest case: thirty acres wrapped by lakes Cannon, Howard and Mirror, with man-made canals near its west and north boundaries.
Reclaimed water, and the City's own rule about washing
Winter Haven runs a municipal reuse programme, and its approved-use list is unusually specific. Reclaimed water may be used for washing of roofs and buildings, in the City's own words, as long as the runoff doesn't flow into surface water such as a pond or stream. In a city with that many lakes inside or on its limits, the pond in that sentence is often the back yard. The same page recommends that after a car, boat or heavy equipment is washed with reclaimed water, the vehicle is rinsed with potable water and towel-dried to prevent spotting — the City writes that about vehicles, and we are not going to stretch it to a roof. Separately, the City states that roughly thirty-eight percent of its drinking water supply goes to lawns and landscapes. If the property is plumbed to a reuse line, tell us.
A small old core, and what the nomination form says it is made of
Two Census buckets here run opposite ways. A bigger share of Winter Haven's housing sits in the oldest one than the county's does — 4.4 percent of the city's housing units date from 1939 or earlier, against 2.6 percent across Polk County — and a smaller share sits in the 1990s, 6.4 percent built between 1990 and 1999 against 14.4 percent countywide. Bucket by bucket is as far as that goes: the Census median year built for Winter Haven, 1990, sits inside its own margin of the county's 1992, so the city's housing cannot be called older than the county's. Winter Haven Heights covers about forty-five acres and 195 buildings, 147 of them contributing, with a period of significance from about 1907 to about 1946; 105 of the district's buildings went up in the 1920s, fifty-seven of them in 1925 alone. The nomination form names the wall fabrics: clapboard, drop siding, wood shingles or stucco, with brick piers supporting most of the dwellings. It records the exceptions house by house — at one address on 3rd Street NE, asbestos shingles serve as the exterior wall fabric, and at another on Avenue D NE the wall is a composite of asbestos shingles, vinyl siding and drop siding, three materials on one elevation and none of them wanting the same treatment. That is a wall you identify before you pick a tip, not after.
The downtown roofs nobody sees from the street
The Downtown Winter Haven district is about fifteen acres and thirty-five buildings, twenty-six contributing, one to six storeys. Its nomination is blunt about how they are built: all the buildings in the district are of masonry construction, many have stuccoed exterior walls, and the majority have flat tar and gravel roofs surrounded by a parapet. A flat tar-and-gravel deck is nothing like the asphalt shingle on a house a mile away, and the parapet hides it, so what the public judges the building on is the stucco face underneath. Pope Avenue, immediately west of downtown, is ten acres and thirty-eight buildings with thirty contributing, one to six storeys again, taking in the former Haven Hotel, now a condominium, on ground that slopes west toward Lake Howard.
One block of Drexel Avenue NE
The Craney Spec Houses Historic District is one block of Drexel Avenue NE, between 15th and 16th Streets: eight contributing buildings and three that are not, with a period of significance of 1956 to 1958, to designs by Gene Leedy, listed on the National Register under the Sarasota School of Architecture. The nomination calls the ten Craney spec houses single-storey, exposed post-and-beam structures, built with the longest runs of beveled wood decking and laminated beams that Craney's Imperial Lumber Company could supply, and long walls of floor-to-ceiling sliding glass panels and doors. Nine of the ten keep their original concrete block wall, and eight of those tie into a street-facing eight-foot block fence. Exposed wood, concrete block and full-height glass on one property is three jobs at three settings, which is why this block is worth asking us to look at in person.
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