2019 South Florida Fair: A time-lapse video of scenes from West Palm
A time-lapse video showing interesting scenes from the 2019 South Florida Fair in West Palm Beach at the South Florida Fairgrounds.
Palm Beach Post
- The South Florida Fair began in 1912 as the “Palm Beach County Fair” to showcase local crops and real estate.
- The event was officially renamed the South Florida Fair for its January 1960 run.
Editor’s note: The South Florida Fair runs Jan. 16 to Feb. 1 this year. It has grown significantly from its humble roots in the early 20th century. Here is the history of the fair and the fairgrounds, from a Post Time column by Eliot Kleinberg that ran Jan. 11, 2018.
For Palm Beach County residents, and especially youngsters, the new year also means the South Florida Fair.
But going to the fair hasn’t always meant traveling to its eponymous current location, west of Florida’s Turnpike on Southern Boulevard. It moved there on Jan. 27, 1958. But it had already been around for decades.
The “Palm Beach County Fair” began in March 1912 as a four-day event under a single tent on the grounds of the Palm Beach County Courthouse. The county, split from Dade only three years earlier, wanted a forum to show off its winter crops, livestock and booming real estate.
The town’s godfather, Henry Flagler, sweetened the pot by offering cash prizes for farmers and others who displayed their wares. The fair moved the following year to a site just to the north, near the railroad depot.
The Depression hit hard and the fair was reduced to a carnival midway from 1930 until 1937, then is believed to have shut down all together. A plan to revive it in early 1942 was quashed by the Pearl Harbor attack.
Putting down roots proved hard for the Fair
It finally reopened in 1946 at the National Guard Armory, then moved in early 1948 to Morrison Field, later Palm Beach International Airport, only to be evicted when the airport reactivated for the Korean conflict.
The fair incorporated in 1953, and from then to 1955, it set up in the parking lot of the Palm Beach Speedway, a 5,000-seat facility with a half-mile, high-banked track, near the site of the fair’s present location along Southern Boulevard and west of Florida’s Turnpike.
In 1956, the county deeded 18 acres at the present site of Palm Beach Community College’s main campus in Lake Worth, and after the fair was held there that year, the county took it back for the school and instead deeded 100 acres next to the speedway.
The 1957 fair was at John Prince Park. Later that year, the fair’s corporation bought the speedway property, about 35 acres. The fair opened on its new grounds Jan. 27, 1958, and was promptly assaulted by a small tornado that blew down six tents but hurt no one. For its January 1960 event, it was renamed the South Florida Fair.
As if to mock its new name, the weather gods slammed the new entity’s opening night with bitter temperatures; the low of 36 set a record not beaten until 1985 when the temperatures dropped to 28.
On that frigid night in 1960, only about 400 brave souls paid admission.
Undaunted, the fair later added 10 exhibit halls, the 40,000-square-foot Expo Hall, an adjacent 70,000-square-foot Yesteryear Village, a paved midway and concourse areas. The Coral Sky Amphitheatre, capacity 20,000, opened in 1995. It’s since gone through several names and now is iThink Amphitheater.
The fair’s budget went from about $50,000 in 1957 to $12.5 million, Kleinberg reported in 2018. In 2024, the fair reported revenues of about $24. 8 million and expenses about $20. 3 million.
Eliot Kleinberg is a former staff writer for The Palm Beach Post and the author of numerous books about Florida and its history.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.palmbeachpost.com ’
