Long before anyone was booking flights to Cancún, the building blocks of spring break were quietly assembling in American college culture. Since the 19th century, well-to-do students have escaped their academic duties by fleeing to states with the nearest coastline. The advent of the car, higher education opportunities for women, and widespread availability of alcohol all fused together into the nationwide phenomenon of the co-ed road trip. With all of these factors settled, the only question left was where to meet up.
Long before anyone was booking flights to Cancún, the building blocks of spring break were quietly assembling in American college culture. Since the 19th century, well-to-do students have escaped their academic duties by fleeing to states with the nearest coastline. The advent of the car, higher education opportunities for women, and widespread availability of alcohol all fused together into the nationwide phenomenon of the co-ed road trip. With all of these factors settled, the only question left was where to meet up.
That answer would appear after a hurricane. In 1926, the Great Miami Hurricane devastated South Florida. To attract visitors, Fort Lauderdale built Casino Pool, the world’s first Olympic-sized municipal pool in 1928. Competitive swimming was just gaining popularity and indoor pools were rare, so word spread fast among Ivy League students. A swim coach at Colgate University brought his team down to train, and others followed. Eventually, the College Coaches’ Swim Forum made it an annual tradition, and by 1953, upwards of 15,000 students were making the trip to Fort Lauderdale each spring.
The cultural explosion came in 1960, when the film Where the Boys Are romanticized the whole scene. The film pulled hundreds of thousands of students south. Fort Lauderdale eventually couldn’t handle the influx, redirecting the crowd to Daytona Beach, Panama City, and Cancún. MTV’s Spring Break broadcasts in the 1990s turned it into a full-blown pop culture institution.
Alex Mostaghimi is a third-year student at BC Law. Contact him at mostagha@bc.edu.
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