In the 1950s, Lake County was the heart of Florida's citrus belt. Orange, grapefruit, and tangerine trees carpeted the rolling hills around Clermont, and the sweet smell of blossoms hung in the humid air every spring. The Citrus Tower was conceived as a way to show it all off - a 226-foot observation platform where tourists driving between Cypress Gardens and Silver Springs could stop, ride the elevator up, and gaze out over a patchwork quilt of green groves and blue lakes. It worked spectacularly. During its early years, the tower drew up to 500,000 visitors annually. Postcards proclaimed "Greetings from Citrus Tower," and the striped tower became one of Central Florida's most recognizable roadside landmarks.

The tower's decline came in two blows. The first was concrete: in 1964, Florida's Turnpike extended northward, giving travelers a faster route through Central Florida that bypassed US 27 entirely. Overnight, the steady stream of highway tourists thinned to a trickle. The second blow came from the sky. Three brutal freezes in the 1980s - in 1983, 1985, and 1989 - devastated Lake County's citrus industry. Temperatures plunged below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, splitting bark and killing trees to their roots. The groves that had once stretched to the horizon turned brown, then were bulldozed. By the early 1990s, the tower's original purpose was gone. There were no groves to admire. The view from the top now showed the raw red earth of construction sites as Central Florida's suburban sprawl marched westward.

The tower changed hands repeatedly as each new owner tried to find a reason for its existence. In 1988, a tram was built to tour remaining citrus crops - a last attempt to connect the tower to its agricultural roots. In 1995, Greg Homan purchased the property and repainted it white and turquoise, a departure from the original orange-and-white stripes. In April 2015, the tower was restored to its classic color scheme, the bold orange bands once again visible for miles. Then in 2022, the Homan family sold the tower to Simchat Torah Beit Midrash for $3.3 million. The new owners renovated the property and reopened it in May 2023 with the stated goal of bringing it back to what it once was. The lobby now houses ROOM: Valencia, a banquet facility, gift shop, and museum chronicling the tower's history.

The Florida Citrus Tower belongs to a vanishing breed of American roadside attraction - the kind built before interstate highways and theme parks changed how people traveled. Its neighbors in this category are mostly gone. But the tower endures, partly because it is genuinely tall (the highest point in a notably flat county), partly because the view from the top still impresses, and partly through sheer stubbornness. Near the tower stands the Presidents Hall of Fame, featuring wax figures of every US president and a scale model of the White House interior - another roadside curiosity from a different era of tourism. Together, they form a pocket of Old Florida kitsch surviving amid the sprawl. The coin drop still works. Visitors still listen for the clink. And from the top, on a clear day, you can still see lakes and green stretching toward the horizon - just not citrus groves anymore.