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.
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.
