Millhaven
Millhaven is a small central Florida lakefront town that's trying really hard — and mostly succeeding.
It's got the kind of historic downtown that looks frozen around 1950, all old brick buildings with wrought iron balconies and colorful awnings running parallel to Lake Monroe, with a riverwalk where people fish off the seawall and strings of lights crisscross overhead waiting to turn the whole place into a postcard at dusk.
Horse-drawn carriages dodge tourists snapping photos of the ornate courthouse. The old train depot from 1887 has been lovingly converted into a food hall with Edison bulbs and Korean corndogs. There's a German restaurant, a diner that used to be a Woolworth's, and a bar that used to be an auto repair shop. Everything in Millhaven used to be something else.
That's the thing about this town — it's a place defined by reinvention. A decade ago, the downtown was crumbling and forgotten. Now it's boutiques and art galleries and craft beer, driven by a mayor with wild Appalachian witch magic and a vision for the governor's mansion. But scratch the pretty surface and the cracks show fast.
Drive a few blocks from the marina and the scenery shifts to peeling paint and sagging porches. The homeless camp in the woods behind the thrift store while workers install a bandstand in the pedestrian plaza for the Fourth of July.
The Royal Palmetto Hotel — the crown jewel of the whole revitalization dream — is still a hollow, moldering shell with smashed windows and snakes in the baseboards, its faded Mediterranean Revival glamour rotting from the inside out. Clara Bow once walked those halls. Now the carpet squelches underfoot and mold creeps up walls where the original wallpaper curls away in long strips.
Millhaven is a town that desperately wants to be its best self, wrapped in bunting and civic pride and historic preservation covenants — but underneath, something is draining the life out of it, one body at a time.
It's charming and sinister in equal measure, the kind of place where the mayor's magic has literally soaked into the walls of city hall, and where the dead accumulate in quiet corners while the living set up for a parade.
