Every year we go to Lake Worth, FL for the Street Chalk Painting Festival. It's a Saturday and Sunday event; we usually head there on Sunday, because most of the art is complete, or at least near complete. This year, we brought a friend who had never been and as we all do, he fell in love the place. The Chalk Festival is celebrating 21 years this year. This is the biggest event of this kind.
It's not just the chalk, but the town itself is what a lot of Miami would strive to be. The center of the small town has every business you could imagine from shoe repair to upscale restaurants, there's a bike shop, a cigar shop, a playhouse and so much more strewn around the main shopping area. This is where the chalk event takes place.
Two main streets, Lake Street and Lucerne Street, and a few side streets are closed and the artists do their thing. There's a section for invited professionals to draw and there's an area where anyone can join in and take part, there is also a children's area, where the kids do some very nice work.
This past weekend the weather was perfect. We ate, we drank, we listened to live music and we people watched. Of course we enjoyed all the artwork which would be gone in the next day or so. The streets are open again to traffic at 7 pm on Sunday night and within a day or so, this chalk art will be gone. Truly ephemeral.
Lucille Ball and Captain America were two of my favorites.
One of my friends joked about not letting greedy developers know about Lake Worth, as they would devour the place as they have done elsewhere all over Florida. But I don't think Lake Worth would allow that to happen.