The Citrus Tower: Visual Glimpes of Florida's Past and Worrisome Future

Clermont’s Citrus Tower is an excellent visual representation of the past, present, and worrisome future of the Sunshine State. The history intertwined with modern-day politics is in full display as you see what Clermont used to be, and what it might become if there isn’t more being done to prevent the slow dismantling of what gives Florida its environmental personality.

 But its more than a piece of history, the Clermont Tower is a nice piece of engineering, a grandiose display of Florida’s beauty, and at the bottom of it a nice coffee shop with emphasis on citrus. Built in the 1950s, the Citrus Tower would be one of the final roadside attractions within the Sunshine State before the arrival of Disney World and the nationwide interstate highway system permanently shifting the tourism traffic away from the smaller towns that thrived off of vacationing wanderers.

With a height of over 200 feet, you can see dozens of miles of Florida from all directions. The perfect relaxing afternoon would consist of visiting Donut King, taking the donuts to Citrus Coffee and purchasing your tickets for the tower as well as some accompanying coffee. Take the elevator top to the very top and just spend hours observing and enjoying the view of Lake Minneola, Downtown Clermont, as well as the nearby state road and the miles of houses, scenery, and cars passing through.

Scattered at the base and also at the peak of the tower are old pictures of the tower as well as what the surrounding scenery used to look like. Clermont and Lake County used to be dominated by citrus groves as far as the eye can see. There were regions of Florida in which you could lower the windows while driving by and can easily smell the oranges. That version of Florida however has been becoming extinct because of natural and unnatural reasons.

There has been a major bacterial infection harming essentially all the orange groves and trees throughout the state. Combine that with a changing climate, less available fertile land for planting, and some devastating deep freezes and the tower’s initial purpose is slowly being phased out. We no longer see miles and miles of orange trees like before, and its because wild weather and diseases have reduced the population of Florida’s most popular fruit. Some of what we’ve been seeing cannot be directly blamed on politics, on people, on anything beyond an awful streak of disease and weather beyond our control.

However.

Has the Sunshine State actually fully invested in saving the oranges in Florida? Has the Floridian GOP honestly made its effort to revitalize, revolutionize, and sustain the citrus industry here? Or has the last quarter century of full GOP rule transformed Florida into a giant vacation real estate marketplace? The Citrus Tower reveals all.

On one side of the Citrus Tower vantage point, you’re going to see a slew of neighborhoods being built on the edges of Minneola, a small town that borders Clermont. Most of those houses you see there are actually empty, overpriced, and being sold only to transplants and upper class folks domestic and foreign. The cheapest houses are being sold at nearly $300,000, and those houses are 25 miles from Orlando, and requires two toll roads to reach it under 45 minutes. If you look on the other side, towards Disney World, you’ll see large swaths of houses scattered between the trees that used to grow oranges. Almost all of these properties are single-family units, no apartments, no affordable housing, and barely any public transportation that could connect you to what the county offers. 

Real estate is drowning Florida, and sacrificing fertile land and the state’s entire personality in exchange for profits. We’re not building smart at all, we’re not building for the population of Florida, we’re building for people that don’t live in Florida and are not used to some of our shenanigans, and these homes are being built in a way that shields the interested customers from the rest of the community and most of the quirks that you experience as a Floridian.

Real estate vultures continue building farther and farther away from the urban centers, from where the jobs can be found, and far away from the downtowns big and small where you’ll find the people and activity. These far-off secluded neighborhoods built from the ground up with similar-looking houses are basically giant bubbles of large mediocre livable pods. That neighborhood in Minneola was not built for me, and was not built with Florida’s environmental footprint in mind. Similar to the bacteria harming the oranges and reducing its flavor and making them look unappealing, we have real estate bacteria harming the state of Florida.

I will never ever ever be the person that says “Florida is too full,” but what I am saying is that the state is more invested in finding snowbirds, MAGA refugees, and super rich folk to sell houses to as opposed to fixing the housing problems plaguing longtime and permanent Floridians. Combine that with the ongoing culture war nonsense and trying to appeal to the current orange cult, as we’re seeing millions of federal dollars being rejected that could help us, and then we see millions literally being sent back to the federal government so Trump can be happy, and then see millions more being spent to build concentration camps in dangerous sensitive land to hold refugees and illegal immigrants.

Imagine what we can do with the 20-30 million dollars we’re eventually going to spend on these camps, imagine instead using that money to better-preserve the orange groves and regions we have left, imagine instead using that money to bring back the orange aesthetics that brought popularity to Lake County. Why can’t we duplicate the popularity of Tokyo’s cherry blossom season? Why can’t we use that concentration camp money to find more solutions to the diseases and damages of our oranges and then plant the hell out of the region and beyond? Why are we continuing to allow our globally unique ecosystems of underground springs, rivers of grass, and thousands of miles of coastlines be under threat by real estate and nature-ignorant buffoons? Floridians deserves better, as does the land we live on.

Back to the Citrus Tower however, because even if its full potential and peak quality was undermined by some of extreme capitalism’s ugliest habits, it’s still nice to visit and look at the beauty Florida still has to offer while battling a slew of circumstances ranging from environmental to political. The tower is very much worth a visit, even if I wish I could see how Lake County looked from 200 feet up during the peak citrus days.

Get some Donut King, grab one of their delicious Citrus Coffee options, head up to the tower and relax and daydream. Make sure to stick around for the Clermont sunset, whether it be from the tower or from the nearby Waterfront Park.

And remember to seek ways to help remove the bacteria infecting these Floridian waters….and I mean the ones in Tallahassee.