Two-thirds of this will now be home to the Delray Beach Greenmarket.
On October 13, the perennially popular Delray Greenmarket will return to downtown every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in its new location, Old School Square Park.
Considering the amount of development, redevelopment, and outright growth downtown Delray has experienced in the past decade or so, it's probably not surprising that the market has gotten shuffled around so much, but the Greenmarket might have finally found a permanent home.
The Greenmarket is a program run by the Delray Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) and, more specifically, for the past 14 years by Lori Nolan.
"It's been a lot of different places," says Nolan. "When I first started to manage the market, it was on First Street behind Dunkin' Donuts. Then it was in the tennis center; then we moved back to First. Then one month, nothing was available and we went to Worthing Park. The vendors said, 'Please don't ever make us leave this park.'"
The market has moved seven times over the years, eventually getting booted from Worthing Park when it became Worthing Place, luxury apartment homes. That's the thing about working to make downtown a thriving, wonderful place to be -- soon as as a place becomes cool, people want to live there, and space becomes a premium. So the beloved Greenmarket was banished to Fourth Street.
"As convenient as it has been, there is nothing charming about Fourth," says Nolan. "It's all pavement. I just really want to make the market bigger and expand it, and we weren't able to do that on Fourth. The only way to grow it was to move."
Luckily, the redevelopment of downtown Delray Beach also preserved some green space. Old School Square Park is a large swath of open lawn that runs right through the heart of downtown. It conveniently adjoins the parking garage -- which is free during the day on Saturdays unless there is a special event going on.
And most important, the Greenmarket will gets its green charm back.
"We have room for 60 vendors now, whereas on Fourth we had 35," Nolan says. "We're going to get the charm back. Not that the market itself isn't charming, but the environment will be charming. And there's benches and some playground equipment."
So far, about 47 vendors have officially registered, but Nolan isn't hurrying to hit 60 before opening day, October 13. She is carefully curating them, looking for the new and interesting and avoiding too much duplication. She's leaving slots so she can add cool new vendors as the season goes along.
If you would like to apply to be a vendor at the Delray Greenmarket, call 561-276-7511, visit delraycra.org and click on Green Market, or send Lori Nolan an email at greenmarket@delraycra.org. The Greenmarket also has its own blog, Delraygreenmarket.wordpress.com. You can also like it on Facebook.
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