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.
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.
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.
