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.
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.
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.
