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.
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.
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.
