As Kissimmee celebrates its 125th anniversary its identity is changing
March 26th, 2008, 9:40 pm Hobby Shops
Some city officials think the cow-town image carries a negative connotation even if they don’t share that view.
The community finds itself in an awkward position of trying to balance cows and sophistication, and that’s not an easy proposition.
Consultant Kate Ange, a principal with Renaissance Planning Group in Orlando, has worked with the city on transportation planning, urban planning and other issues. She said embracing old and new is part of the plan, such as saving historic homes and buildings in the downtown district, while creating around those historic treasures a modern urban downtown with character where people can live, work and shop.
“They do pay a lot of subtle attention to that past,” Ange said, “but I think that they want to be seen as a city of the future more than anything.”
A few city leaders have tried to shake off the image, and some remaining cowboys resent it.
City Commissioner Cheryl Grieb pushed last year to change the city’s logo from one with a Brahma bull to a more modern look, indicative of a progressive city. A specific new design was never finalized.
“Some people seem to think that we all own ranches down here,” she said.
The $288,000 price tag of reprinting everything from park signs to a gym floor kept the logo proposal from moving forward.
Grieb said she values Kissimmee’s history but said the city needs to look toward its future. For example, the city is scheduled to become a transportation hub for commuter rail, she said.
Changing the logo was merely one step toward changing the image as a cow town, she said.
“I think the logo thing was blown out of proportion,” she said, adding that she’s neither anti-history nor anti-cowboy, but knows the city is much more than it used to be.
Johnson thinks the city should do more to preserve the cow-town heritage downtown, where sidewalks are embedded with a cowboy-hat emblem and an iron archway depicts a cowboy. An ambitious preservation effort aimed at saving historic structures has been mapped out in the city. It just isn’t enough, he thinks, to save the sense of cowboy culture. He’s not sure anything can be done at this point.
Often, Johnson is the only man in a cowboy hat at his wife’s restaurant, Mrs. Mack’s Diner on Broadway Avenue.
“There’s not much downtown to remind you of it now. Makinson Hardware is the only true thing still there.”
Makinson Hardware is the oldest continuously operating store of its kind in the state and once bought pelts from trappers and sold supplies to cowboys. Today, its wares are more of the hammer-and-nail kind, but a horse statue outside reminds customers of the cow-town past.
Local historian Jim Robison, whose new book, Kissimmee: 125 Years of Its People and Progress, details the city’s heritage, said Kissimmee’s cowboy culture is unique to Florida. Other towns such as Mount Dora, St. Augustine and Sanford have historic downtowns centered around art and history. But none has the cowboy heritage — or the unique challenge that comes with mixing that past with the present.
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