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 Army Air Corps' sole radar training school, where thousands of airmen learned the new science, and a training ground for B-29 crews. Part of the field had risen on the farmland of the Yamato Colony, the Japanese settlement founded around 1904 whose families lost their land to wartime eminent domain — Yamato Road still carries the name. After the war the airfield's land became Florida Atlantic University — authorized in 1961, opened in 1964 — 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.
Through all of it, Boca Raton became a magnet for the Northeast. Families from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and beyond moved south or wintered here, until the city's character became as much transplanted-Northeast as native-Florida — a connection that ties Boca, in its own way, back to our New England roots. Today it's an affluent coast of beaches, golf, the arts at Mizner Park, and a hundred years of Mediterranean Revival style, with the Cloister Inn marking its centenary in 2026.
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.
