Comment on Free and fabulous: Fort Lauderdale’s Day of the Dead celebration still reigns

Fort Lauderdale’s eye-popping Day of the Dead celebration will return on Saturday, Nov. 2, filling downtown’s Esplanade Park and Riverwalk with the costumed, family-friendly merriment, parading puppets, marching mariachis and freestyling Frida Kahlos that have made it a seasonal South Florida must-do for 15 years. The event is still coming back from destructive 2023 floods that claimed many of organizer Jim Hammond’s most popular puppets — and the road to recovery was again, incomprehensibly, detoured by damaging high water in his studio this past June. But the indefatigable showman says that while he has still been unable to rebuild some of his crowd-pleasing puppets, this edition of Florida Day of the Dead will be the same free and fabulous event that has made lists of the best Día de Los Muertos celebrations in the country by the Travel Channel, USA Today and other publications. Hammond calls it a triumph of community that extends from the logistical and moral support of people like Riverwalk president/CEO Genia Duncan Ellis and Jarred John of Damn Good Hospitality, which hosts the DOTD after-party outside Revolution Live and Backyard, but also to random angels. “We’ve had total strangers send us Home Depot gift cards, even now, for the rebuild.