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The name came long before the architect. Spanish charts called the inlet here Boca de Ratones — often mistranslated as 'rat's mouth,' but really a sailor's term for an inlet studded with hidden rocks that frayed anchor ropes. Long before that, the Glades culture, ancestors and kin of the Tequesta, lived along this coast and the Intracoastal lagoon for thousands of years. Through the Spanish and British colonial eras and into Florida statehood in 1845, the place stayed wild and thinly settled — a stretch of subtropical coast waiting for a town.
Mizner was hired as Town Planner in May 1925 with a vision of a Mediterranean dream city — barrel-tile roofs, stucco walls, wrought iron, courtyards, and a grand twenty-lane boulevard called El Camino Real. He formed the Mizner Development Corporation and sold five million dollars of stock in less than a week to a who's-who of the age — among them Harold Vanderbilt, Rodman Wanamaker, Irving Berlin, and Elizabeth Arden. Ground broke on the Cloister Inn that August, and on February 6, 1926, its doors opened: a hundred rooms, vaulted ceilings, and fourteen-karat gold-leaf columns, billed as the most expensive hundred-room hotel ever built.
Why People Visit Boca Raton
Boca Raton rewards visitors who want South Florida with a century of style behind it — Addison Mizner's Mediterranean Revival architecture, a beautiful stretch of Atlantic beach, the arts and dining of Mizner Park, and a genuinely surprising history that runs from a secret WWII radar school to the birthplace of the personal computer. People come for the beaches and the resort glamour, for the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and for an easy, refined coastal day with deep roots.
