Order the First Bank Smash Burger at The Vault and the person handing it to you is standing where a teller once counted deposits for the State Bank of Pompano, which opened its doors on this same lot on September 25, 1922. The vault itself is still there, a few feet from your table, and the murals on the walls trace back to 1924, the year the Ashley Gang robbed this building. A hundred years later the space is a bar again, just a different kind of bank job. Order a Money Maker Mimosa and nobody blinks. That's the joke the whole menu is in on.
Five years ago none of this existed. Old Town Pompano was the historic strip nobody built a Friday night around. Now it's the reason people cross town after dark, and the shift didn't happen the way most neighborhood transformations get described, slowly, ambiently, block by block. It happened inside three specific buildings, financed through three specific city programs, inside a district the city itself drew the boundary lines for. If you live in Pompano Beach and haven't walked it lately, the version you remember is already out of date.
The Bank That Became the Bar
The Vault sits at 61 NE 1st Street, inside the actual 1920s bank building, and the design leans all the way into that history rather than hiding it. Owner Jessica Spill-Chaples kept the original vault as the room's centerpiece and commissioned murals depicting the Ashley Gang robbery, the kind of local history that would otherwise live only in a historical society archive. The building's exterior improvements, the windows, the paint, the storefront face, came partly through the city's Façade & Business Site Improvement Program, a CRA grant built specifically for restaurant and retail buildouts in the district.
The bet paid off fast. In the Sun Sentinel's 2026 South Florida Favorites, The Vault took Gold for Best New Restaurant, Silver for Best Salad, and Bronze for Best Appetizers. The menu keeps the bank joke running through every section: the First Bank Smash Burger, the Banker's Benedict with short rib or shrimp cake, a Bloody Bandit and a Banker Bellini at Sunday brunch. It's the kind of specificity that only works because the building underneath it is real.
Two Doors Down, a Different Kind of Revival
A few minutes away on South Federal Highway, Revelry opened in May 2024 with a grand opening party that drew Pompano Beach's mayor and a spread from Tampa Bay Brewing Company and Cantera Negra tequila. The two founders, Garcia and Tarantino, spent a combined nearly three decades working at Revolution Live in Fort Lauderdale before building something of their own. One of them, Brando, put the pitch to Miami New Times plainly: the area was surrounded by corporate and chain restaurants, and Revelry wasn't going to be another one.
The bet there was entertainment, not just food. Every Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., Revelry runs the only burlesque brunch in Pompano Beach, a rotating cast of performers so the show never repeats. On other nights it's live bands, vinyl DJs, and a monthly event called Spelling Buzz, an adult spelling bee hosted by comedians, which is not a phrase you'd expect to describe a bar three blocks from a 1922 bank vault, and yet here we are.
The Backyard That Used to Be a Grass Lot
Walk south to 165 NE 1st Avenue and you hit South Bar & Kitchen, a Southern and Cajun-Creole concept from Chef Kelly O'Hara and owner Mike Linder that opened in May 2023 inside a building that was a general store back in the 1900s. Its patio opens directly onto Old Town's Backyard, and that space has its own story worth knowing if you've ever wondered why there's a full-grown Ficus tree wired with string lights sitting in the middle of a restaurant patio.
Before 2021, that lot was an underutilized stretch of grass with empty storefronts around it, owned in pieces by five separate property owners. The CRA negotiated ground leases across all five parcels, on a 30-year term, and broke ground in October 2021 while working around the tree rather than through it. The project finished in 2023 and won the Florida Redevelopment Association's award that year for Creative Organizational Development and Funding. South Bar & Kitchen was the first business to open onto it.
Why This Block and Not Another
None of this is scattered redevelopment. The city's own map draws the Old Town Commercial District as the specific blocks between South Dixie Highway and NE 1st Avenue, and between Atlantic Boulevard and NE 3rd Avenue. The Vault sits on NE 1st Street inside that box. South Bar & Kitchen sits directly on NE 1st Avenue, one of the district's defining lines. Revelry sits one block over on South Federal Highway, close enough that a night out treats all three as one loop.
The financing behind it follows the same logic. When the CRA backed developer Adache with a $7.8 million Real Estate Development Accelerator incentive to build Old Town Square, CRA Director Nguyen Tran explained the mechanism this way: the money is tax increment financing, meaning it's the developer's own future tax growth funding the project, not new money pulled from other taxpayers. The proof of concept showed up almost immediately. Old Town Square worked well enough that the same developer built a second phase, Old Town Square II, without asking the CRA for anything, because that block sits just outside the official zone. The district didn't grow by accident. It grew because the incentives were pointed at specific parcels, and the businesses that took the bet are the ones now defining what a night in Old Town looks like.
Here's what a loop through the district looks like right now, in roughly the order you'd hit it:
- The Vault, 61 NE 1st Street, for the bank vault, the murals, and a Banker's Benedict
- South Bar & Kitchen, 165 NE 1st Avenue, for the Cajun menu and the Backyard's lit-up Ficus tree
- Revelry, 227 S Federal Hwy, for Saturday's burlesque brunch or a weeknight with live music
- Bailey Contemporary Arts, the renovated Bailey Hotel, for whatever exhibit is currently up
- 26 Degrees Brewing, another CRA-backed Old Town success story, if you'd rather end the night with a beer than a cocktail
Old Town Untapped, the district's monthly block party, runs the first Friday of every month from 6 to 10 p.m., free and open to all ages, and it lands on all three of these blocks at once. That puts this Friday, October 2, right at the start of the season, with the Cultural Arts calendar and the Amphitheater's fall lineup picking up from there. If you've been meaning to see what all the noise is about, that's the easiest night to do it on foot.
None of this required a new development or a master-planned district built from scratch. It required three buildings that were already standing, a handful of city grants aimed at exactly those blocks, and owners willing to bet on a corridor most people had written off. The bank building didn't need to become a bank again to matter. It just needed someone to notice what was already there.
If you're the kind of person who reads a post like this and starts wondering what it would actually cost to live inside walking distance of it, Denise Gobin has spent 25 years watching Broward County's overlooked corners turn into the ones everyone wants in on, Old Town included.
