Before the Walt Disney Amphitheater sat at the edge of Lake Eola, a Prairie School bandstand stood in the water, and two women who had spent their careers pushing into a male profession designed it.
Ida Annah Ryan and Isabel Roberts partnered in the 1920s as Ryan and Roberts, one of Orlando’s dozen or so architecture firms at the time and the city’s first that was led by women.
Ryan, born in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1873, was the first woman to receive a master’s degree in architecture in the United States, graduating from MIT. She won the Rotch Prize in 1905, earning a traveling scholarship to study in Spain and Italy. She opened what is described as the first women’s architectural practice in the country in Waltham around 1909, and was admitted to the American Institute of Architects only after repeated rejection by the Massachusetts chapter. She joined the institute in 1921, as only the eighth woman in the country.
Roberts, born in 1871 in Mexico, Missouri, studied at an architectural atelier in New York before joining Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park studio in Illinois as one of his first employees. She worked on ornamental glass and design details. Architect Thomas A. Heinz has written that her talent and position in Wright’s office were “largely ignored and underestimated.”
Both women ended up in Central Florida, where they formed their partnership (both in business and life). They worked from a downtown office and from their own home studio at 834 Kenilworth Terrace [GMap] in what is now the Park Lake Highland area, a Mediterranean house with scalloped buttresses on a gabled frame.
Their best-known Orlando work was the 1924 Lake Eola bandstand, built over the water and connected to shore by a short bridge. The firm won a design competition against about a dozen other architects. The structure had strong horizontal lines, a cantilevered roof, and Japanese-inspired layered roofs and lanterns. Orange County Regional History Center executive director Pam Schwartz called it “a really cool kind of a funky-looking piece of architecture that sat out in the water.” It was later removed and replaced by the current amphitheater.
Their other work includes the 47-unit Amherst Apartments on Lake Concord, finished around 1921 and 1922 and demolished in 1986, and a cluster of buildings in St. Cloud, including the Veterans Memorial Library, now a heritage museum, and Ross E. Jeffries Elementary School.
Ryan died in 1950 and Roberts in 1955. Roberts is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, next to her mother and sister, where a commemorative headstone was added in 2016 after it was unmarked for decades (we’re not sure why). Ryan, per her wishes, was buried in her hometown of Waltham, Massachusetts.
