The Roaring 1920’s would sometimes come to a screeching halt in downtown Orlando thanks to the city’s traffic control tower, which sat in the middle of the intersection of Orange Avenue and Central Boulevard.
The tower, erected in August 1925, rose high above the busy roads below.
Orlando’s Evening Reporter-Star newspaper described the tower’s debut “as part of the new automatic traffic signaling system. During the hours of the day when traffic at this corner, Central and Orange, is the heaviest, a police officer will cut off the automatic operation of the system and direct traffic by moving a lever switch which will change the red, green and amber lights suspended over the center of five other intersections.
“A telephone line from the tower to police headquarters will give the officer at the tower immediate communication with the sergeant in charge at the city hall in case of traffic jams or other instances when help is needed.”
Later additions to the tower included signs advertising local baseball games and loud speakers, which broadcast music from Orlando’s first radio station, WDBO-AM.
One Orlando newspaper writer in the early 1930s called the tower, “As much an Orlando institution now as the famous oak trees.”
The Aug. 7, 1925 front page of Orlando’s Evening Reporter-Star shows the new downtown traffic tower being inspected by local officials. (Orlando Sentinel Staff)
But a little over a decade after it was constructed, when traffic downtown started to really increase, the tower became a problem with people crashing their cars into it. The Orlando Sentinel even ran an editorial in 1936 titled, “Down with the tower.”
“The signal tower, corner of Central and Orange Avenues, has outlived its usefulness and is now a menace. It should be removed,” the editorial said.
“At one time when Orlando was being baptized in the fire of get-rich-over-night, the traffic tower was erected as sort of a fetish to the spirit of land boomism. All that was needed to make the thing complete was a golden calf on the top. Its menace to traffic is all too obvious. Before someone is killed, and the tower will serve as a monument to needless loss of life, let us have done with it.”
The Sentinel got its wish. At the stroke of midnight on Oct. 2, 1937, the tower was demolished as Orlando instituted a new, “modern” traffic light system downtown.
In its story on the demise of the iconic tower, the Reporter-Star wrote, “The signal tower was built back in 1925 when such things were all the vogue. At one time it was equipped with loud speaking horns and motorists were treated with free dance music while they waited for lights to change.
“But that went out as all fads do and today the tower constitutes more of a traffic menace than an aid, officials pointed out. So down comes the tower at midnight and in goes the modern timing system.”
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