Why Old Town Pompano's Galleries Never Go Stale

Walk down NE 1st Street on a weekday afternoon this month and the windows of the old Bailey Hotel are doing something most storefronts in Pompano Beach are not: showing you work still in progress. Through the glass, someone is sanding a slab of reclaimed cedar. A kiln door is propped open to cool. A half-finished coffee from Blooming Bean, the shop tucked inside the building, sits on a worktable next to a jar of brushes. None of it is staged for foot traffic. It is just a Tuesday at Bailey Contemporary Arts.

Ask a longtime Old Town resident why there always seems to be something new on view here and most will shrug and say that's just how it is in this part of the city. The more specific answer is that the City of Pompano Beach pays a rotating group of working artists to occupy that building on a fixed schedule, and the four exhibitions currently open across three of the city's cultural venues are what that arrangement looks like when it is running as designed.

Four Shows, Three Buildings, One Calendar

None of this is one gallery doing its own thing. It is a coordinated season across the city's Cultural Affairs Division, and as of this week all four exhibitions are open and free to the public.

Shape, Break, Build is worth the walk on its own. It's a decade of Luke Jenkins working reclaimed wood through CNC carving, thermal modification, sandblasting, joinery, and even controlled termite activity, landing somewhere between sculpture and furniture. Down the street at the Cultural Center, In Connection pulls together painting, collage, photography, and mixed media from the Coral Springs Artist Guild around a theme of what holds communities together, according to the city's announcement of the season. None of it requires a ticket. All of it closes by late September, so this is a September-not-October kind of plan.

The Stipend Behind the Studio Door

The reason there's always a new show, and always someone actually working behind the glass, comes down to how BaCA structures its Artists in Residence program. The city closed applications for its 2026-2027 class back in late March, and the incoming cohort of eight studio artists moves in this October 1 for a nine-month term that runs through June 30, 2027, according to the program's official call for entry. That means the artists working behind BaCA's windows right now are finishing out the current term, and a fresh set of faces takes over the second-floor studios in about seven weeks.

The terms are specific enough to explain the turnover you see on the street. Resident artists get a share of participation payments once the residency wraps, plus a separate materials stipend tied to their solo month in the spotlight, can sell work out of their own studio without the building taking a cut, and split proceeds 70/30 in their favor when they sell through the second-floor gallery or the closing group show. That is a real, if modest, income structure built around presence. The trade for eight artists getting free studio space, two shared kilns, and a built-in audience is that they are expected to actually be there, working, where residents and visitors can watch. That is why the windows on NE 1st Street rarely look the same two months in a row. A new cohort moves in every October.

The Building Doing the Work

The venue itself has its own backstory, and it explains why the city bothered building this system around a single address instead of scattering it across town.

• Built in 1932 as the Bailey Hotel, it is the second-oldest standing building in Pompano Beach, right behind the old Farmer's Bank building next door, and part of what's described as the longest contiguous collection of historic buildings in Broward County.
• The Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency bought the building in 2012 for $1 million and completed a $1.2 million renovation in 2014.
• It now holds a dozen artist studios, two first-floor galleries that function independently or combine for larger shows, and a second-floor social space built for the residency program, plus the two kilns mentioned above.

In other words, the city didn't just fund an arts program. It bought and restored the one building in Old Town positioned to anchor it, then built the funding structure around that specific address.

What Comes Back in November

The same six-block stretch does double duty. Green Market Pompano Beach, presented jointly by the Pompano Beach Historical Society and the city, runs the second and fourth Saturday of every month from November through April on the Cultural Center Campus at 50 W Atlantic Boulevard, the same campus that hosts the Pompano Beach Cultural Center exhibition above. It used to sit at Old Town Plaza next to BaCA before consolidating onto the Cultural Center grounds, a small but telling detail: the city keeps folding its Old Town civic functions into one walkable footprint rather than spreading them out.

The market itself leans into that civic overlap rather than pretending to be a simple produce stand. Recent seasons have paired the vendor stalls with free yoga on the lawn, a kids' crafts table, a Family Cultural Dance Sampler taught by instructors from Ashanti Cultural Arts, and a DJ. The city has also used market Saturdays to run a free tree giveaway through its Urban Forestry Department and hand out water-saving retrofits and compost bins, according to the city's own event page. None of that is decoration. It's the same municipal apparatus that funds the artist residencies showing up on a folding table instead of behind gallery glass.

It's mid-August now, which means the market is between seasons. If you're the kind of person who keeps a mental list of Saturday mornings, this is the moment to pencil in its return this November rather than discover it's already back in progress.

The Pattern, Not the Program

None of this is a coincidence of a few good grants landing in the same year. It's a repeatable structure: the city owns and restores the buildings, pays working artists enough to stay physically present in them, and times its own market programming to land on the same campus. That's why Old Town's galleries don't feel like a rotating tourist attraction dressed up for visitors. They feel like a neighborhood that keeps producing its own culture because someone built the plumbing for it to happen on a schedule, year after year, whether or not anyone outside the six blocks is paying attention.

If you already live near NE 1st Street, you've probably felt this without naming it. If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in Pompano Beach beyond the beach photos, this is a fair place to start looking. For questions about specific pockets of Pompano Beach, Patti Davila is always happy to talk through what a neighborhood is really like to live in, day to day, not just what it looks like from a listing photo. Schedule your concierge consultation whenever you're ready.