Boca Raton Florida — Retro Vintage History

What's with the pink tower? Look up the Intracoastal Waterway from miles away and you'll see it — the soft coral-pink tower of The Boca Raton, the resort that began life in 1926 as Addison Mizner's Cloister Inn. That tower is the signature of a whole city: in a single astonishing year, a Palm Beach society architect promised to build 'the foremost resort city on the North American continent' here on the South Florida coast, and the Mediterranean Revival style he stamped onto Boca Raton never left. The pink tower is the easiest way to see it, but the whole town is Mizner's.

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.

That town began as farmland. In 1903 the settlement counted eighteen people; by 1920, about a hundred, raising pineapples and vegetables in the sandy soil near the inlet. Boca Raton first incorporated in 1924 as 'Bocaratone,' then re-incorporated under its present name on May 26, 1925 — right at the peak of the great Florida land boom, when speculators were turning swamp and scrub into paper fortunes up and down the coast. Into that fevered moment stepped Addison Mizner, and everything changed almost overnight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our Boca Raton logo carries Florida's alligator above 'Florida Territory — Est. 1845,' the shared retro emblem of our Florida places, drawn in worn black-and-white like an old crate label or woodcut stamp. The alligator is Florida itself: tough, adaptable, at home in the subtropical heat. It's the through-line that links Boca to every other Florida place we make. What makes this one Boca Raton is everything around it — the pink tower, the barrel-tile roofs, the inlet of hidden rocks, and the Mediterranean city Mizner built in a single year.

Today Boca Raton is a city of about a hundred thousand on five miles of Atlantic beach, refined and easygoing at once. Its story runs from the Glades culture and the Spanish inlet, through the pineapple farms and Mizner's 1926 dream, to the radar school, the university, and the birthplace of the personal computer. Our Boca Raton designs gather that layered identity into wearable form — the alligator and the Mediterranean line, the pink tower and the tide. Boca Raton, Florida: the city Addison Mizner built, a hundred years on.

Boca Raton, Florida — Travel Guide

Visiting Boca Raton Today

Boca Raton sits on the Atlantic in southern Palm Beach County, about forty-five miles north of Miami — a polished coastal city of Mediterranean Revival architecture, five miles of beach, the Intracoastal Waterway, and nearly fifty parks. Its historic core runs from the pink tower of The Boca Raton up through Mizner Park and the old Town Hall museum, all of it easy to explore in the South Florida sun.

Mizner Architecture, the Beach & the Arts

For visitors looking for things to do in Boca Raton, Florida:

• See the Mediterranean Revival landmarks — the pink tower of The Boca Raton and the courtyard of The Addison, Mizner's 1925 designs.
• Stroll Mizner Park, the Mediterranean-style outdoor district with the Boca Raton Museum of Art and the amphitheater.
• Walk the Old Floresta Historic District, Mizner's earliest neighborhood of barrel-tile bungalows.
• Relax at Red Reef Park and the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, with its sea-turtle rehabilitation and coastal boardwalks.
• Visit the Boca Raton History Museum in Mizner's restored 1927 Town Hall, with its IBM PC and WWII air-field exhibits.
• Spend a beach day along the Atlantic shore and South Inlet Park, where the historic Boca Raton Inlet meets the sea.

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.

For deeper reading on the Boca Raton history described here — the Glades-culture pre-contact inhabitants, the Spanish 'Boca de Ratones' inlet name, the early-1900s pineapple-farming community, the 1924 and 1925 incorporations, Addison Mizner's appointment as Town Planner and the Mizner Development Corporation, the 1926 opening of the Cloister Inn and the land-boom collapse after the September 1926 hurricane, the 1942–45 Boca Raton Army Air Field radar-training era, the 1962 founding of Florida Atlantic University, and the August 12, 1981 introduction of the IBM Personal Computer — it may be useful to consult (1) the Schmidt Boca Raton History Museum and the Boca Raton Historical Society, (2) the Boca Raton Public Library local-history collection, (3) the State Archives of Florida and the Florida Historical Society, (4) the FAU Libraries' Boca Raton and Mizner archives, and (5) the City of Boca Raton clerk's records. For travel and visitor information, it may be useful to contact (1) Discover The Palm Beaches, (2) the Greater Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce, (3) the City of Boca Raton parks and recreation, (4) Florida State Parks, and (5) the regional transit and Palm Beach / Fort Lauderdale airport information desks.