Daytona Beach’s Boardwalk grew a section at a time starting in 1928. And now, it’s growing again.
The section of the Boardwalk at the Breakers Oceanfront Park is being extended southward and will reach the Harvey Avenue Beach Approach, 245 feet farther.
This project comes after the city rebuilt the historic arch at the Main Street beach approach.
Building first section of Boardwalk an act of desperation by Daytona
Building the first section of the Boardwalk was something of an act of desperation by the city in the 1920s. It was close to the bottom of the Great Florida Land Boom collapse. Banks were failing, and tourism was declining. Something had to be done to draw visitors here.
“The (city) commission is of the opinion that the Boardwalk will bring many visitors to Daytona Beach from inland Florida during the summer months,” the Daytona Beach Morning Journal reported approvingly on May 18, 1928.
The Boardwalk was also sometimes called “the Broadwalk” since it was not made of boards. “To call a cement plaza a boardwalk is an absurdity,” one letter to the editor complained in The News-Journal in 1929. Regardless, the Boardwalk name stuck, in part because it was the favored name used by the newspaper.
The first section of the promenade immediately proved popular but public demands for further extensions proved impractical until 1937, when improvements were started under the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration.
The Bandshell was dedicated in 1938, 10 years after the Boardwalk project began.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: A look back at Daytona’s growing Boardwalk
Reporting by Mark Lane, Special to The News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
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