Boca Raton: Addison Mizner's Dream That Went Broke

Boca Raton in the nineteen twenties was going to be the most glamorous city ever built in Florida. Addison Mizner was going to make sure of it.

Mizner was the architect who had already transformed Palm Beach into a playground for the Gilded Age rich. He had a gift for blending Spanish Colonial arches, Moorish ornamentation, and Mediterranean courtyard design into something that felt simultaneously ancient and extravagant. By nineteen twenty-five he was the most fashionable architect on the East Coast, and he had a new project: he was going to build a world-class resort city in Boca Raton from the ground up.

His brother Wilson joined him. Together they formed the Mizner Development Corporation and raised money from Irving Berlin, W.K. Vanderbilt the Second, and T. Coleman DuPont. The town of Boca Raton was incorporated in May of nineteen twenty-five at the height of the Florida land boom, and the city council immediately commissioned Mizner to plan the whole thing.

He envisioned a city of Venetian canals, Mediterranean Revival hotels, and European plazas, a resort to rival anything in the world. He began building. The Cloister Inn, later renamed the Boca Raton Resort, opened in nineteen twenty-six as a showpiece.

Then the hurricane came. September of nineteen twenty-six sent a powerful storm through South Florida that broke the land boom's back almost overnight. Investors stopped buying. Land values collapsed. The Mizner Development Corporation went bankrupt. Addison Mizner himself died in nineteen thirty-three, broke and largely forgotten by the celebrity investors who had lionized him a decade earlier.

What he left behind was the architectural character of the city. The Mediterranean Revival buildings, the pink stucco, the red barrel tiles, the loggia arches. Boca Raton has built around that original vision for a hundred years. The dream failed. The style endured.