Orlando sells itself on castles and roller coasters, but some of the strangest moments in American pop culture happened a short drive from the theme park gates. A recent Frommer's roundup pulled together the addresses where history quietly went down, and several of them sit on property you can walk right into.

Take the end of the Beatles. On 29 December 1974, John Lennon — on holiday at Disney's Polynesian Resort — signed the paperwork that formally dissolved the band. Disney can't confirm the exact room, but it's believed to have been a ground-floor corner room in what's now the Samoa longhouse. Roughly a year earlier, the same resort area supplied another infamous line: Nixon told a ballroom of Associated Press editors "I'm not a crook" at the Contemporary Resort's Ballroom of the Americas on 17 November 1973, deepening the Watergate crisis.

Orlando also kept Walt Disney's secrets. The Cherry Plaza Hotel — now an apartment building at 425 E. Central Boulevard — hosted LBJ in 1964, the first sitting president to overnight in the city, and on 15 November 1965 it was where Walt and Roy Disney announced plans for "the equivalent of Disneyland" in Florida. Walt's only public Orlando appearance, it came 13 months before his death. His first completed building on Disney World land, the glass-and-steel Preview Center from January 1970, still stands on Hotel Plaza Boulevard near Disney Springs, now occupied by the Amateur Athletic Union.

Literary pilgrims have options too. Jack Kerouac lived at 1418 1/2 Clouser Avenue in College Park from July 1957, writing The Dharma Bums in a 10-by-10-foot room with a cot and a bare bulb, months before On the Road made him famous. The Kerouac Project owns the house and gives writers three-month rent-free residencies.

There are sadder markers: a CVS in Winter Park now covers the Cheek to Cheek Lounge where The Band played their final-fling gig before pianist Richard Manuel's death in March 1986, and Bob Ross — who died in 1995 at 52 — rests in Gotha's Woodlawn Cemetery, about nine miles west of downtown, where fans still leave paintbrushes at his grave. Comic Bob Saget died in his sleep at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes in January 2022 after a show at Universal's CityWalk.

For a quirkier stop, the 226-foot Citrus Tower in Clermont opened in 1956 over roughly 17 million citrus trees. The groves are housing developments now, but the elevator still runs, and you'll likely have the view to yourself. Even Orlando International Airport has an art moment: Duane Hanson's hyperrealistic 1985 sculpture of a slumping tourist in a salmon polo, hiding in plain sight in Terminal A.

Why bother? Because these spots cost nothing, most are minutes from the parks, and they add actual stories to a trip that's otherwise heavily scripted. If you've done the rides or you're travelling with someone who'd rather not queue for a third day, plot a morning around the Kerouac house, the Preview Center and a Polynesian stroll — you'll come home with better anecdotes than a churro photo.