What's Actually Changing When Coral Springs' Festival Of The Arts Returns

For years, a weekend in March meant the same walk. Shoppers and gallery browsers filled the sidewalks under mature tree canopy at The Walk of Coral Springs, ducking between more than 200 artist booths, orchid tables, and two stages of live music. A new version is planned for spring 2027, with soccer fields at Mullins Park and a city contract instead of the original nonprofit structure. It will differ from the event that closed out its run in 2025 in its venue, management, and funding model.

The original festival and its final year

The Coral Springs Festival of the Arts started in 2004, the brainchild of a local mortgage broker named Shirley Richards who reportedly heard that no festival that far west in Broward County could draw a real crowd. She built one anyway, run through a 501(c)3 nonprofit and produced with Howard Alan Events, a national promoter with dozens of art fairs across the country. The festival took over The Walk with a juried show of 175 to 200-plus artists and crafters, paired since 2016 with Gardenfest, the Garden Club of Coral Springs' own orchid and native plant show held on the same weekend. Attendance ran 30,000 to 40,000 people a year, drawing families from three counties.

Despite annual attendance of 30,000 to 40,000 people, organizers ended the event after its 19th and final run on March 15 and 16, 2025, citing the financial burden of sustaining it and mounting difficulty keeping enough volunteers on staff year after year.

Before closing the books, the committee distributed what remained to a handful of South Florida nonprofits, including SOS Children's Villages, the Sawgrass Nature Center and Wildlife Hospital, the Coral Springs Community Chest, and the Parkland Memorial Foundation. The festival had spent two decades raising money for causes across the region.

How the city plans to organize the new event

As Coral Springs FL News reported, within months of the final festival, city commissioners started pushing to bring the event back. In April 2026, the city issued a request for proposals seeking a professional firm to manage a new version of the event under a city contract. The new structure would place management with a contracted firm rather than a volunteer nonprofit board producing the show year to year.

Here's how the two versions compare on paper:

The contract length is worth pausing on. A two-year base term with the option to extend to six total years could give the new event a longer planning horizon.

The venue swap changes more than the view

The Walk did more for the festival than provide a backdrop. Its tree-lined layout let organizers run a free shuttle between two parking areas, the Coral Springs Center for the Arts and the City Hall parking garage, ferrying attendees in every 15 minutes throughout the weekend. Shoppers could wander from an art booth into an actual storefront and back again, which is part of what made the event feel woven into downtown rather than dropped on top of it.

Mullins Park is a different kind of space. It's built for athletics, not foot traffic past shops, and the RFP documents describe the new event spreading across several of its soccer fields rather than threading through a commercial district. That likely solves a real logistical headache. A park built for large gatherings comes with more contiguous open space and presumably its own on-site parking, which could simplify or eliminate the old multi-lot shuttle system entirely. What it won't replicate is the sense of a festival happening inside the town's daily commercial rhythm. For a longtime attendee, that's the difference between browsing an art fair on your way to lunch and driving to a fairground for the day.

What we don't know yet

Proposals for the new event were due May 6, 2026. As of this writing in mid-August, no vendor has been publicly announced, which means the specifics of who will run the show, how it will be marketed, and whether it will carry the same name are all still open questions. A few things are worth watching for as more comes out:

• Whether Gardenfest returns in any form. The RFP's vendor categories list arts, crafts, candles, food products, and spices, with no explicit mention of the plant and garden vendors that had shared the bill with the original festival since 2016.
• Whether the new event keeps the free-admission model that made the original one accessible to any resident who wanted to walk through for an hour.
• Whether "spring 2027" holds. The documents describing the new event's target date were dated April 20, 2026, and the language used, "likely taking place," leaves some room for the date to shift.

For now, the honest answer for anyone who's circled a weekend in March on their calendar for the better part of two decades is that there's a two-year gap between the last festival and the earliest possible return, and the event that comes back will be run by different hands, in a different park, under a different funding model than the one generations of Coral Springs residents grew up walking through.

If you're the kind of resident who's been going to this festival since your kids were in strollers, or since before you had kids at all, that gap is worth noticing. Traditions like this one are part of what makes a neighborhood feel like more than a collection of houses, and watching how a city brings one back shows how civic traditions can evolve.

If you're weighing a move into Coral Springs, or thinking about what your own home might be worth in a market that still supports civic investments like this one, Timothy Byrne has spent more than two decades working these neighborhoods alongside his son Colin. Let's Connect if you'd like a local read on what's happening in your corner of Broward.