Things to Do in Pompano Beach for Fall 2026
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
Summer in Pompano thins out. The Amphitheater goes quiet after mid-July, Old Town Untapped takes June off, and the downtown Green Market has been dark since April. If you have lived here for more than a season, you know the rhythm: a stretch of long, humid Fridays where the working plan is usually the pool, the pier, or somebody's back patio.
Then the first Friday of October arrives, and the neighborhood flips.
That single date is the argument of this post. Fall in Pompano is not a soft ramp. The city's arts department, its resident theater company, and the Amphitheater's touring calendar are all engineered around one weekend, and once that weekend lands, the calendar runs booked through Memorial Day with almost no gaps. If you plan your fall around Untapped's first Friday, most of the rest of the season assembles itself.
Old Town Untapped is the anchor. It started in 2016 as a way to get people looking at Pompano's craft breweries, and it has since become a cultural arts and music block party that draws crowds from Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. The event runs on the first Friday of the month from 6 to 10 p.m., free for all ages, centered at NE 1st Street and N. Flagler Avenue near the Bailey Contemporary Arts Center at 41 NE 1st Street.
The scheduling detail worth knowing is that Untapped runs October through May only. It skips summer entirely. That means the first Friday of October is the first night since spring where downtown Pompano's food truck lot, gallery doors, live music, and craft beer setup are all operating at the same time.
Here is the shape of the season in dates you can lock down now:
Docent-led tours at BaCA typically run from 8 to 8:45 p.m. during Untapped nights, which is the easiest way to see the current exhibition without carving out a separate visit. Parking is available at City Hall (100 W. Atlantic Blvd.) and the Pompano Beach Cultural Center (50 W. Atlantic Blvd.), both within a short walk.
The Pompano Beach Amphitheater at 1806 NE 6th Street is one of South Florida's most distinctive outdoor venues. The tensile-fabric roof gives you shade and rain cover while keeping the space open air, the elevated concert seating means the sight lines are honest, and the grounds outside the seating bowl can hold another 7,000 people for larger festivals. Total capacity sits close to 3,000 for a standard concert configuration.
After the mid-summer touring window closes, the venue gets quiet for a few weeks. Then October brings two shows on the calendar that residents should know about now, because both will move on price as they get closer.
| Date | Show | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sun, Oct 11, 2026 — 8:00 p.m. | Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox | Doors at 6:30 p.m., known for reworking modern pop into vintage jazz and swing arrangements |
| Mon, Oct 26, 2026 — 8:00 p.m. | CAKE | The Sacramento band whose catalog runs from "The Distance" to "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" |
A Monday-night CAKE show is the kind of booking that tells you something about the Amphitheater's confidence in its local audience. Most venues save marquee weeknight slots for markets they know will fill. Tickets are through the box office and standard resale channels; the venue is strict on the bag policy, so plan around no coolers, no backpacks, and no outside food or drink.
If the Amphitheater is Pompano's outdoor room, the Pompano Beach Cultural Center is its indoor one. The 2026–2027 season leans heavily on tribute concerts and musical theater, which is a fair reflection of what actually sells in this market. A few of the productions residents have been asking about:
For anyone who wants theater with more edge, the resident company at the Hive Black Box Theater is staging the South Florida premiere of School Girls, Or the African Mean Girls Play, set in 1986 at the Aburi Girls' School in Ghana. The Hive also hosts an intimate concert series on the fourth Thursday of every month, which is one of the more underused nights on the local calendar.
Untapped and the Amphitheater get the attention, but the fall calendar has three or four other standing dates that quietly do the heavy lifting once you know they exist.
The Green Market returns in November. From November through April, the downtown Green Market runs on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month. Produce, baked goods, handcrafted soaps, and vendor-made goods, with the same walkable footprint as Untapped. Two Saturdays a month plus one Friday plus whatever the Amphitheater is running gives most weekends a natural anchor.
Music Under the Stars runs on second Fridays. The city's second-Friday music program lands the week after Untapped, so if you build the season correctly, you have live music downtown two Fridays a month automatically. No planning required.
BaCA changes exhibitions on a rolling schedule. The current gallery run at Bailey Contemporary is Carried Home by Luke Jenkins, an artist whose work centers on Cryptotermes brevis, a termite native to the Atacama Desert of Chile, on view through September 12, 2026. The next exhibition rotates in ahead of the October Untapped kickoff, which is deliberate. The gallery openings and the block party are timed to reinforce each other.
Story Time and Intro to Painting at the Blanche Ely House Museum. First Saturdays of every month. Family-friendly, low cost, and one of the most overlooked cultural assets in the city. The Blanche Ely House sits inside the broader Cultural Affairs Department programming and does not always show up on general event calendars, which is why residents who know about it treat it as an insider tip.
Once fall is in motion, the annual festivals start stacking up. The Pompano Beach Seafood Festival, which was founded in 1984 by the Chamber of Commerce and the Pompano Beach Fishing Rodeo and now benefits 12 local charities, returns in the spring at Pompano Community Park. Jazz Fest Pompano Beach, the Nautical Flea Market, Pompano Caribbean Fest, the Namaste! Festival, and the Holiday Boat Parade fill in the calendar between now and the following summer.
If you are new to the neighborhood and trying to figure out where to start, the practical order is Untapped first, then whichever Amphitheater show catches your eye, then a Green Market Saturday. Everything else layers on from there.
Neighborhoods reveal themselves through their calendars. The reason Pompano's fall feels different from Pompano's summer is not weather. It is a deliberate scheduling decision made by the arts department: pack the October-through-May window with recurring anchors, then let the annual festivals slot into the gaps. Residents who lived here five years ago remember when the arts calendar was thinner and the Amphitheater's booking felt inconsistent. That is not the current reality. The 2026–27 season is one of the most fully programmed the city has run.
For anyone thinking about the Pompano Beach lifestyle beyond the beach and the pier, this is the part that does not show up on a listing sheet. If you would like to talk through what living here looks like at the neighborhood level, or you are weighing a move between coastal communities in Broward and Palm Beach County, Rachel Hutchings is available for a free consultation. Warm, unhurried, and built around your questions.
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