Broomfield Days

Breakfast is served at the Girl Scout Shelter in Midway Park from seven until ten on the morning of the third Saturday in September. The city calls it a community pancake breakfast. For the 2026 festival the schedule listed it under the Rotary Club of Broomfield Crossing, at $12 for anyone 13 and older, $6 for ages 6 to 12, and free for children 5 and under. The city’s question-and-answer page names the Lions Club as the sponsor.

Broomfield Days is the City and County of Broomfield’s one-day outdoor festival. It fills Midway Park, which runs along Midway Boulevard between Nickle Street and Kohl Street, east of U.S. 287. The festival goes on rain or shine, and the city tells visitors to come prepared for the Colorado weather. The 2026 edition was held Sept. 19. Midway Boulevard closes from Kohl to Laurel Street for the day. The Boy Scouts run a bike corral, and leashed, well-behaved dogs are welcome.

The race and the parade down Midway

At 8:20 a.m. runners start the Mayor’s Cup 5K and the 1-mile Fun Run. Day-of registration opens at 7:15 just east of the fire station, cash or check only. At 9:30 the community parade leaves Main and Midway Boulevard and reaches the park about 10. Floats are judged by category. A sweepstakes award goes to the best entry overall among the floats and marching bands, and nonprofit and community groups enter without a fee.

In 2026 three seventh graders from Westlake Middle School, Lilly Dion, Sydney Long and Harper Devine, led off the parade. Awards were presented at noon from the reviewing stage. The Daniel the Lion Foundation won overall best and Legacy High School won the marching band prize. Tehanis Hula Colorado took the adult marching group award, Colorado Krav Maga the commercial float, and the Broomfield Bike Club the car-and-cycle class. Winners who missed the ceremony picked up their trophies at the front desk of the Paul Derda Recreation Center. The city’s photographs from 2013 and 2014 show the parade opening behind the Broomfield Honor Guard and a police motorcade.

Three stages, a petting zoo and a dock for dogs

By 9 a.m. the boulevard is open for business. Arts and crafts, a trade fair run by the Broomfield Chamber of Commerce, food booths, carnival games, pony rides and a petting zoo line the street. The city counts more than 300 vendor booths, along with food trucks and inflatables. A beer garden stands on each side of the park, each with an ATM nearby. The information booth is on the south side near the fire station.

The Optimist Clown Contest opens the Demonstration Stage at 10:30. It is a contest for children, and the Broomfield Photography Club’s pictures from 2026 show children in costume for it. Local performers follow on the same stage. Elite Dance Academy danced in 2026. At noon came the Sister Cities program: the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes; Lalitpur, Nepal; and Ueda, Japan. Broomfield Jazzercise, the city’s hula fitness class, Taps ‘N Toes and several dance companies filled the afternoon, and Batala Colorado closed the stage at 4:30. Iluminar Aerial performed on a separate stage at 11 a.m.

The Main Stage stands east of the fire station. In 2026 it carried Globalsound Studio at noon and School of Rock at 1:30, and Wrenn Van played from 3:30 to 5:30. By the city’s account she performed around the Front Range for more than seven years before moving most of her time to Nashville. One of her unreleased originals was used in the soundtrack of the documentary Tri Me: The Siri Lindley Story.

The south side of the park belongs to BowWow Broomfield, an area set aside for dogs, their owners and pet-friendly vendors. The Rocky Mountain DockDogs open their dock for practice at 8 a.m. and run Big Air waves through the day. In 2026 the Extreme Vertical Contest went at 3 p.m., and a fourth wave started at 5. The area also holds the “Dogs for a Cause” small dog races. The dogs alone stay into Sunday: in 2026 they returned for another Big Air wave, a Speed Retrieve competition at 11, and the Big Air Finals at 1:30 p.m.

The Broomfield Senior Resource Board parks its car show on the grass of South Midway Park from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. All years, makes and models are welcome, and the proceeds support programs for Broomfield seniors. The board’s photographs from 2022 show a classic red car, a Volkswagen Beetle and a row of muscle cars. A 2026 photograph by Cal Cheney shows a man seated below the hood of a car on display. The duck race starts at 2 p.m. north of the Girl Scout Shelter, with entries taken at Pink Z. The Rotary Club calls bingo at the same shelter on the Friday evening before the festival and again at 6 p.m. Saturday, $5 for a pack of ten games, cash only.

From Daphne Street to a virtual year

The city says Broomfield Days began as a way for local nonprofit groups to raise money. The festival keeps that purpose by asking vendors to donate to a nonprofit, and nonprofit booths must give all of their proceeds to their organization. The pages consulted give no founding year.

In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic moved the festival online, and the city opened a page where residents could post memories. Most of the old pictures in the record come from that page. One shows the first Broomfield Days parade heading south on Daphne, crossing 6th Avenue, and the city asked neighbors whether they could find their houses in it. Someone posted film of the 1961 parade, and the city asked whether anyone had footage older than that. Others posted highlights of the 1976 parade, the Broomfield Police Department’s vendor booth “back in the day,” festival T-shirts from past years, and a “jail” photo prop whose prisoner nobody had yet named. In September 2026 the city posted a photograph from 1989 of six vintage one-seater cars rolling through the parade, with watchers lining Midway.

A resident posting as kellicole wrote about the years 2010 through 2018. Her daughter Ana was born on September 19, so the festival fell on or near her birthday. Ana danced in the parade and on the stage every year, from her first season of competitive dance at Elite Dance Academy through her senior year on the Broomfield High School pom squad. For those nine years, the family came for “the fun, the food, the dogs, and of course, Paul Derda as emcee.”

A logo of grain elevators and show homes

Each year the festival’s logo and theme come from a resident contest, and the design goes on that year’s commemorative T-shirts. In 2014 the theme was “Small Town Friendly With Large-Town Opportunity.” Christy Logan supplied the basic design and the theme. Kevin Lavarnway, whom the recreation department’s Barbara Ploeger called “a bit of a history and architectural buff,” supplied the history. Lavarnway said that “architecture plays a critical role in the continuity of a community.”

Ploeger’s account gives the town’s background. Broomfield began as a farming community. It later became one of the early post-World War II master-planned developments, paid for largely through home buyers’ GI Bills. Lavarnway learned from a longtime resident that President Eisenhower toured the original show homes in the 1950s.

Broomfield graphic designer Elaine Jones combined the two entries. The upper part of the 2014 logo showed the Brunner Farmhouse, the Zang Farm grain elevators and the early train depot. It also showed the marquee that once welcomed shoppers to the shopping center where the Garden Ridge store now stands. Along the bottom ran the present: the Interlocken and Flatirons area, the Omni Interlocken Resort and the 1stBank Center.