“The Patron Saint of Justice,” a new mural by the internationally renowned Icelandic artist Lokey Prakkarastrik, featuring Polk County’s often controversial but never camera-shy Sheriff Grady Judd, has been approved to replace “The Calm.” The former mural depicting a group of people riding atop a whale has graced the west side of Heartland Church in downtown Winter Haven since 2015. “I must admit, at first, I was at a loss,” Prakkarastrik said. Eventually, the artist found he

Swans? More like yawns. Zebra Longwing Butterfly? But why? It’s official. Lakeland and Winter Haven have new city symbols. After reviewing the abilities and weaknesses of many creatures in the MonsterVerse, Mayor Bill Mutz chose Godzilla to be Lakeland’s new symbol, and Mayor Brad Dantzler tapped Mothra for Winter Haven on March 16. Both mayors signed executive orders despite many detractors. Rumors are swirling around what caused this sudden power move. A source close to Dan

Start your engines and glue down those dentures, Polk County. It’s time for the 2022 NAMSER Races. The Polk Elderly Alliance and Polk County Tourism, in partnership with NASCAR, are bringing you the national phenomenon that is the National Association for Motor Scooter Elderly Racing (NAMSER). Instead of mullets and mustaches, the stands will be filled with Life Alert necklaces and arthritis. The 2022 NAMSER Cup, to be held at the Auburndale Speedway next month, will host two

The time was 2:04 am on October 9, 2021. A security system picked up movement outside an arts organization in Winter Haven. An alarm rang out as management and police were alerted and raced to the scene to discover the cause of the disturbance. What would they find? Broken glass? Had they been robbed? Far worse… or should I say ‘fart’ worse. A thick green ‘F’ had been spray-painted in the middle of the sign. The Lake Art Association was now the Lake Fart Association. “We felt

A buzzsaw drowned out the tink, tink, tink of a hammer on a nail as we walked through a busy construction site with Winter Haven restauranter Dan Keebler. We passed a tap wall waiting for its finishing touches and a stack of tan cafeteria trays. Haven Magazine was granted a first look into the restaurant that has gums flapping across the county. The new soft food bistro, Chewz Wisely, is located in a strip mall a mile and a half south of LEGOLAND on Cypress Gardens Boulevard.

Get all the hecks and fricks out while you can. A new ordinance is taking place in the City of Lakeland that will ban profanity and language construed as such. The City Commission voted unanimously to pass ordinance 21-053 on March 15, 2021. The ‘Do You Kiss Your Mamma with that Mouth’ Rule, as it has been dubbed, will effectively ban all our favorite swears between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm, Monday through Friday. The community can frig and darn at their leisure between 5 p

Winter Haven Water Tower Gets a New Look Relations between Winter Haven and Auburndale have sprung a leak over a new design on the downtown Magnolia Watertower. The tower was covered last month while undergoing phase I of a project that will include “major maintenance including a fresh coat of paint,” according to a February 11, 2021 press release by The City of Winter Haven. In this first phase of the ongoing beautification project, the tower will be painted with a base shad

Streaking – we’ve all done it, right? In small towns like ours across the country, it’s a right of passage. How does one streak? Remove all items of clothing and take off running with a group of your best buddies. The objective? Feel the wind on your fanny and try not to get caught. Why do it – boredom? Love of the streak? Well friends, it’s time to stretch out those hamstrings and leave the sweatpants at home because there’s a new nudie club in town. Streaking has shaped wor

Haven Opts for Office Drive-Thru It has been over two years since Haven has had a permanent office space. Since then, we’ve worked in our publishers’ living room and two other temporary spaces – putting out two magazines a month, 12 times a year. Destroyer Media & Marketing is excited to announce that we finally have a permanent home in the works. One of the things we loved most about being in an office accessible to the public is how much we could interact with our readers t

State Finals Come to Polk County If you’re a lover of all things rodeo, it’s time to dust off your chaps! The Hamster Rodeo State Finals is making its way to a roughly 5-square-foot patch of the Bartow Horse Arena at the Polk County Agri Civic Center. Be prepared for all the gruff and a lot more fluff at this must-attend event. The hamster rodeo is an endeavor by the Hadley Association for Hamsters in America (HAHA), a project spanning the last two decades. The sport of tradi

It appears a hush-hush python problem is reaching a fever pitch around the outskirts of Polk County and rapidly slithering inward. The snake problem could reach critical mass within months, says resident python hunter and former A/C repairman Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts (no relation to the WWE wrestler). Reports of nonnative giant snakes plaguing the Everglades stem back to the 1970s – a time of bell bottoms and Burmese pythons. Over the past four decades, the population of pyth

On February 22, the Winter Haven City Commission voted unanimously to pass ordinance 0-21-06. The ordinance allowed chickens as an accessory use in all non-agricultural zoning districts within city limits, whereas they were previously only allowed in Agricultural (AG) zoning districts. The ordinance also provided “specific standards related to chicken quantities, permitted locations on the property, and coops.” What started as a simple run-of-the-mill reporting on a city comm

Bread has been at the center of everything for Honeycomb Bread Bakers founder, Benjamin Vickers. In an interview with LKLD Haven last summer before the opening of his brick and mortar bakery inside of Twenty Seven, Vickers said, “My dream is to serve people, and fill their bellies, and make good bread.” The formally trained baker seems to be fulfilling this dream with the success of his golden bee brand. Honeycomb has become synonymous with honest, humble, good food. At the B

Lakeland and Winter Haven are Polk County’s two most populated cities. For almost as long as the two cities have existed (Lakeland was founded in 1885 and Winter Haven in 1923), these have made up the two largest parties in the figurative east/west divide of the county. This unspoken feud spurred the drafting of a 1934 bill to “build a great and indestructible partition” between them. Support and funding fell through and the bill was to be buried in the depths of the county’s

Winter Haven mayor, Brad Dantzler has announced his bid as an Independent nominee in the 2020 American presidential election. Will America, ‘Save the last Dantz’ for Brad? “I’ve always said if there was any other office I would run for – it would be for president,” remarked Dantzler. His strategy to win the hearts of voters is simply to combine responsible, forward-thinking policy stances, with his love of the arts, specifically dance. Dance has always been the first love of

What will the former K-Mart building on Cypress Gardens be? Target, Ulta, and Trader Joes are only a few of the suggestions tossed out by the community. Last month we finally got an answer to that question. The 6,340 squarefoot space at 6031 Cypress Gardens Blvd. is slated to be the site of MEGAPLANET, an interactive indoor amusement park by the children’s toy conglomerate and direct competitor to LEGO, Mega Bloks. As the former retail space is already in a plaza, the plan is

Central Florida has always been a regional nucleus for agriculture. Orange groves and strawberry fields seem to go on forever and the area is rife with festivals, markets and roadside stands selling and celebrating local farming culture. One trend has Polk County farmers setting sail in search of a more buoyant hobby. Perhaps these fruits and veggies will make their way to a farmer’s market near you, sooner than you think. A ferry, taxiing tourists from Newport Beach to Balbo

In 2011, NASA ended its almost 40-year-old space shuttle program. Economic rough waters, significant maintenance, and the fact that the shuttle program “did not truly deliver the next major leap forward” ultimately lead to its closure according to a 2017 article by Tech Times. In the years following, astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, and other space experts have been trying to find the coordinates for the closest shuttle route to space – and they finally have. 27.97

Cynics have long pushed the idea that the future of content is entirely electronic – that books, newspapers, magazines are soon to go the way of the dinosaur. At Haven, we’ve found that if you keep your product hyperfocused on a community you care about and do your best to be a resource for and a reflection of that community, there will be no end in sight for print. Everyone here at Haven and LKLD Magazines are very excited to say we are expanding! (Or contracting depending o

Lake monsters and giant sea serpents have been the stuff of folklore and nightmares for centuries. Something about the murky depth of a barely explored ecosystem on the same planet we inhabit is unnerving. Perhaps the most infamous freshwater mythical beast is Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. Accounts of a staggeringly large prehistoric animal date back as far as ancient stone carvings, with the first written account surfacing around 565 AD. The “surgeon’s photograph” snapped i