Boca Raton's modern story is stranger and more inventive than its resort glamour suggests. From 1942 to 1945 the Boca Raton Army Air Field was a top-secret base — the only place in the country that trained military radar operators, and a training ground for B-29 crews. After the war the airfield's land became Florida Atlantic University, founded in 1962, whose campus still traces the old runway lines. And on August 12, 1981, in an IBM facility in Boca Raton, a small team unveiled the IBM Personal Computer — the machine that launched the modern PC era. For a city built on a Mediterranean fantasy, Boca turned out to be a quietly serious place.
The dream lasted barely a year. In September 1926 the Great Miami Hurricane tore through South Florida and the land boom collapsed behind it; the Mizner Development Corporation went bankrupt in 1927, and Addison Mizner died, his fortune gone, in 1933. But the architecture outlived the money. The Cloister Inn passed through new owners to become the Boca Raton Club, then the Boca Raton Resort & Club, and finally The Boca Raton, the pink tower of its 1969 addition still presiding over the water. Around it survive the Mediterranean Revival bones Mizner laid down — the bungalows of Old Floresta, the courtyard of The Addison, and the old Town Hall, now the city's history museum.
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.
