Next Beach
Every town that pushed spring break away sent it somewhere else. Daytona Beach took it from Fort Lauderdale and later had its own second thoughts; then Panama City Beach, South Padre Island, Lake Havasu, Cancún and the Mexican coast, Negril and the Bahamas. The circuit has moved for ninety years and has never yet stopped moving.
Part of Spring Break
30 moments in this segment.
- - Travel trailer at St. Petersburg Beach. A holidaymaker seated beside a travel trailer at St. Petersburg Beach around 1960. Towed trailers were how a large share of Florida's visitors arrived and how they stayed cheaply within walking distance of the sand.
- - Modelling on Clearwater Beach. A model photographed on Clearwater Beach in 1960 for the Department of Commerce. The Gulf coast towns were competing for the same holiday traffic as the Atlantic resorts across the peninsula.
- - Swimmers in dive masks at Pensacola. Two swimmers face to face in dive masks at Pensacola in 1962, in a small print made for the Department of Commerce.
- - Two-piece bathing suits at Pensacola Beach. Women modelling two-piece bathing suits at Pensacola Beach in 1963, on a colour transparency made for the state's tourism publicity.
- - Bethune-Cookman College on film. A documentary about Bethune-Cookman College, the historically Black college in Daytona Beach, filmed in the 1960s and opening with footage of student protests on other campuses. It records college life inside one of Florida's beach cities.
- - Civil rights demonstrations at St. Augustine. Newsfilm of the 1964 St. Augustine demonstrations, including an attack on Black demonstrators at Butler Beach and night-time crowds in the streets. Access to the sand was still being fought over in the same years the state was selling the beach as a holiday.
- - A couple at the beach. A couple at the water's edge somewhere in Florida in 1966; the Department of Commerce record names no beach. It is the standard image the state circulated of what a beach holiday looked like.
- - Long Beach Court, Panama City. The Long Beach Court motel at Panama City around 1966, on a colour negative from the Richard Parks collection. Low-rise motor courts like this made up the lodging strip along the Gulf shore.
- - Petticoat Junction station at Panama City Beach. The railroad station of Petticoat Junction, a themed attraction at Panama City Beach, photographed in 1967. Attractions like it lined the road behind the sand and were part of what pulled traffic to the beach.
- - Picnic on the beach at Cayo Costa. Holidaymakers picnicking on the sand at Cayo Costa island in 1968, in a colour print from Florida Memory's print collections.
- - Spring break on the Texas coast. A WFAA news report broadcast on 6 April 1969 on spring break along the Texas coast. It shows the break was never only a Florida story, even in its first decades.
- - Sunset on a Sarasota beach. An empty Sarasota beach at sunset, dated by Florida Memory to around 1970 and taken by Joseph Janney Steinmetz. A companion frame of sea oats from the same shoot was dropped as a near-duplicate.
- - Daytona at Easter, uncut. Raw agency material from the Easter break at Daytona in April 1971: cars driven onto the beach, beer drunk in parked vehicles, a hearse pressed into service as sleeping quarters and plates from New York, Wisconsin and Connecticut. The uncut reel carries more of the scene than the edited story does.
- - The Easter exodus at Daytona. Silent colour agency footage shot on 23 April 1973 as students left Daytona Beach at the end of the Easter break, with aerials over emptied sand at Daytona and Fort Lauderdale. The departure was as much a set piece as the arrival.
- - The break spreads beyond Florida. A short television item from 1976 on spring break as the phenomenon spread to destinations beyond Florida. The decade between the Fort Lauderdale of the 1960s and the televised beach of the 1980s is thinly documented, which makes short clips like this useful.
- - Picnic at St. Andrews State Park. Visitors picnicking at St. Andrews State Park at Panama City in 1977. The park, opened in 1951 on a former military reservation, gave the town a stretch of public beach away from the commercial strip.
- - Concession stand at Panama City Beach. A beachfront concession stand at Panama City Beach photographed in December 1983, well outside the season. Stands, motels and clubs along the beach road were the commercial spine of the town.
- - Richard Marx at the Daytona Clamshell. Richard Marx performs at the Daytona Beach Clamshell on 18 March 1988 during spring break. Daytona's beachfront stages drew touring acts for a decade, and the bookings are a good measure of the town's pull.
- - Cabanas at the Riviera Beach pier. Beach cabanas beside the pier at Riviera Beach in 1989, photographed for the Department of Commerce. A quieter stretch of the Atlantic coast at the end of a loud decade.
- - Hard Copy goes to Panama City. A 1990 segment from the syndicated news magazine Hard Copy on spring break in Panama City, Florida. Panama City Beach was taking the crowds Fort Lauderdale had turned away four years earlier.
- - Officials on the Daytona beachfront. Footage from Black College Reunion weekend in Daytona Beach in 1995, featuring the city's mayor and a police department chaplain. It captures how the city chose to present the event on camera.
- - The sand at Panama City Beach. Crowds along the Gulf shore at Panama City Beach, which absorbed much of the trade after Fort Lauderdale and then Daytona turned away from spring break. Within a decade the town would pass its own restrictions.
- - American students fill Acapulco and Cancun. Agency footage shot in March 2007 of US students in Mexican resort towns, in the clubs and on the beach at Acapulco and Cancun. Mexico had become a mainstay of the American break by then.
- - A beach crowd at the start of the season. An amateur photograph from the 2007 season. Most surviving imagery of ordinary spring break is exactly this, snapshots by the people who were there, rather than press photography.
- - Myrtle Beach in March. The South Carolina resort during the 2007 season. Myrtle Beach is one of the Atlantic destinations that took a share of the traffic as the Florida towns tightened their rules.
- - South Beach during spring break. Miami Beach in the 2007 season, well before the city began issuing the emergency orders and curfews that would define its spring breaks in the 2020s.
- - Padre Island looks back at the rowdier years. A South Texas station compares spring break on South Padre Island with earlier seasons, when the island's officials had to work around far more unruly crowds. It is a rare local attempt to place the current season against its own history.
- - How Panama City Beach became the capital. WMBB traces the twenty-five years in which Panama City Beach called itself the spring break capital of the world, its run of MTV broadcasts and country music bookings, and how the town ended it. Reported by the station that covered the whole period.
- - South Padre Island braces for the season. KENS 5 reports on how spring break at South Padre Island shifted through the pandemic years and how island police prepared for the 2022 crowds.
- - Cancun in season. An hour-long documentary on the weeks each spring when American students take over the Cancun hotel strip, following the trip from arrival to departure. Mexico's Caribbean coast absorbed much of the crowd that Florida cities pushed away.
