Most first-time visitors to Bok Tower Gardens leave with the highlight reel: the pink-and-coquina tower, the one-o'clock carillon concert, the reflection pool, a walk through Pinewood Estate, a sandwich at the Blue Palmetto Cafe. That is a good day. It is also, honestly, the tourist skim. The place has been operating continuously since Calvin Coolidge dedicated it on February 1, 1929, and there are layers to it — a Pulitzer-winning autobiography, a Depression-era brass door carved by the same sculptor who did the Atlas at Rockefeller Center, one of the world's largest carillon archives sitting quietly in the basement, and an ancient scrub ecosystem underneath the whole property that predates the Rocky Mountains. What follows is the deeper cut, the twelve things that make Bok Tower Gardens and the Lake Wales Ridge more interesting the longer you look.
1. Edward Bok is buried at the foot of his own tower. Bok died in January 1930, less than a year after he dedicated the tower to the American people. He left instructions to be interred at the base of the south door, and he is still there, under a simple marble slab set flush with the flagstones. Most visitors walk over it without noticing. The inscription is his grandmother's line, the same line he took as the motto of his life: 'Make you the world a bit better or more beautiful because you have lived in it.' He printed that sentence in the Ladies' Home Journal for years. He built a two-hundred-and-five-foot Gothic tower on top of a Florida sand ridge to prove he meant it.
2. Bok won a Pulitzer for writing about himself in the third person. His 1920 memoir, The Americanization of Edward Bok, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1921, and the unusual conceit of the book — Bok narrates his own life in the third person, referring to himself throughout as 'the Dutch boy' or 'the editor' — was widely praised at the time as a form of self-effacement. He arrived in Brooklyn from the Netherlands at age six with almost no English, and by his mid-thirties was running the most-read magazine in America. The book is still in print. It is short. It is worth an afternoon before you visit the tower.
3. The Great Brass Door was carved by the sculptor who did the Atlas at Rockefeller Center. The north entrance of the Singing Tower is a set of massive brass doors depicting scenes from the Book of Genesis — the Creation, the Garden, the Flood, the Ark — modeled by Lee Lawrie, the Art Deco sculptor whose other credits include the fifteen-foot bronze Atlas holding up the world at 45 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan and the reliefs on the Nebraska State Capitol. The door alone weighs more than a ton. It is almost never open. You are meant to stand in front of it and read it like a stone Bible.
4. The architect died before he finished the building — and won the AIA's highest honor the same year. Milton B. Medary of Philadelphia designed the tower in a hybrid of Gothic Revival and Art Deco that has no true peer in American architecture. He was awarded the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal in 1929, the profession's highest honor, and died a few months later in August of that year, before the tower was fully complete. The project was finished under the supervision of his firm and the sculptor Lee Lawrie, who essentially became the artistic director of the tower's exterior program in Medary's absence.
5. There is a carillon library inside the tower that scholars fly to Florida to use. The Anton Brees Carillon Library, named for the Belgian musician who served as Bok's first carillonneur, sits at the base of the Singing Tower and holds one of the largest collections of carillon music, recordings, and archival material in the world. It is a working research library. Carillonneurs from Europe and Asia travel to Lake Wales to consult scores that exist nowhere else. Most day visitors never realize it is there.
6. The bells were cast by the same English foundry that cast Big Ben's replacement bell. The sixty bells of the Bok carillon were cast by the John Taylor & Co. foundry in Loughborough, England — the same firm that recast Great Paul for St. Paul's Cathedral, restored bells for Westminster, and remains one of only two working bell foundries in the country. The largest bell in the Bok carillon weighs nearly twelve tons. The smallest weighs sixteen pounds. The carillonneur plays them from a wooden keyboard called a clavier, using loose fists and feet, in a small chamber more than a hundred and fifty feet up inside the tower.
7. The tower is not a building you go inside. This surprises people. The interior of the Singing Tower is closed to the public and always has been. There is no observation deck, no elevator ride to the top, no gift shop in the belfry. The tower is a musical instrument and a monument, and it was designed to be experienced from the outside, across the reflection pool, with the carillon playing overhead. The moat around it was deliberately engineered so the tower appears to float when the water is still.
8. The gardens sit on top of a two-million-year-old desert. The Lake Wales Ridge — the narrow spine of sand hills running down the center of the Florida peninsula, with Iron Mountain as one of its high points — is a relict Pleistocene sand dune complex. When sea levels were much higher, this ridge was a chain of offshore islands. The scrub ecosystem that clings to it today has been evolving in isolation for well over a million years, which makes it one of the oldest continuously terrestrial habitats in North America and one of the most concentrated centers of endemic species anywhere on the continent. More than thirty plant and animal species are found on this ridge and nowhere else on earth.
9. Bok Tower runs a national endangered-plant program. Behind the public gardens, in a section most visitors never see, the foundation operates the Rare Plant Conservation Program, a working seed bank and living collection of federally listed endangered plants — many of them Lake Wales Ridge endemics like Florida ziziphus, scrub blazing star, and pygmy fringe tree. It is part of the Center for Plant Conservation's National Collection. In botanical circles, Bok Tower is as well known for this quiet work as it is for the carillon.
10. The Florida scrub-jay lives in the neighborhood, and only in the neighborhood. Aphelocoma coerulescens, the Florida scrub-jay, is the only bird species endemic to the state of Florida — it lives nowhere else on earth. It is federally threatened, and one of its last strongholds is the scrub habitat on and around the Lake Wales Ridge. Birders come to Lake Wales specifically to see it. Look for a bright blue, tail-heavy jay with no crest, hopping along low sand pines in the scrub, unusually bold with humans.
11. Pinewood Estate was originally called El Retiro, and it is a Great Gatsby-era time capsule. The twenty-room Mediterranean Revival mansion on the south end of the property was built between 1930 and 1932 as a winter home for Charles Austin Buck, a vice president at Bethlehem Steel. Buck named it El Retiro — 'the retreat.' The formal Italianate gardens around the house were designed by William Lyman Phillips of the Olmsted firm. The interior is largely intact from the original build, right down to the tile floors and the wrought-iron work, and the December holiday decoration is the single most photographed moment of the Bok Tower calendar.
12. Chalet Suzanne, five minutes north, sent soup to the moon. No Bok Tower visit is complete without a mention of Chalet Suzanne, the eccentric inn and restaurant that opened in 1931 on a citrus grove just north of the gardens. Its signature romaine soup, canned on-site for decades, was carried aboard the Apollo 15 and Apollo 16 lunar missions in the early 1970s at the request of astronauts who had fallen in love with it during winter stays. The inn's cluster of oddly angled towers, hand-painted tiles, and low-ceilinged dining rooms is a landmark in its own right; the inn's restaurant operations have wound down and reopened several times over the years, so check ahead, but the property itself remains one of the strangest and most romantic pieces of pre-Disney Florida still standing.
The through line in all of this — the tower, the door, the library, the mansion, the ancient scrub, the endemic bird, the moon-soup — is that the Lake Wales Ridge has been quietly hosting an outsized share of Florida's most interesting cultural and biological history for a very long time, and Bok Tower Gardens is the best single place to see the whole story in one afternoon. Plan on more time than you think you need. The tower rewards patience. Sit through a full concert. Read the door. Find the grave. Then walk the scrub trail out to the edge of the property, where the Ridge falls away into the citrus groves, and try to remember the last time a piece of America felt this deliberately built to outlast us.