The Town of Boca Raton was incorporated in May 1925, at the height of the Florida land boom. The town council hired society architect Addison Mizner to plan a resort city. The boom ended in 1926 and most of his plan was never built, but his Cloister Inn, finished in 1926, survives as The Boca Raton resort. The 1927 Town Hall at 71 North Federal Highway follows Mizner’s design and now houses the Boca Raton Historical Society’s history museum.
In 1942 the Army Air Corps opened a wartime radar training facility here, and Florida Atlantic University took over the old airbase site in 1962. FAU’s main campus sits at 777 Glades Road, next to Boca Raton Airport, a state-owned general aviation airport. IBM opened a facility in the city in 1967, and the first IBM PC was developed there in 1981. Downtown, Mizner Park opened in 1991 on the site of the old Boca Mall on Federal Highway, with shops, apartments, an amphitheater and the Boca Raton Museum of Art.
Housing stock
Boca Raton’s housing is split between houses and apartment-style buildings. Census survey data show about as many homes in buildings of five or more units as detached single-family houses, with a large share in buildings of 50 units or more, and a median construction year of 1983. The oldest stock is in and around downtown, where Old Floresta’s 1920s Mizner-designed houses have stucco walls, wrought-iron balconies and barrel-tile roofs. Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club, on land between the resort, the Intracoastal Waterway and Federal Highway, dates to 1959.
Mixed-use buildings are part of downtown too: Mizner Park combines apartments with retail and office space. West of the city, the Boca Raton postal area continues into large unincorporated golf and club communities that grew mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Boca West. Expect a wide range of building ages, from 1920s houses under historic district rules to recent downtown towers.
Getting around
I-95 and Florida’s Turnpike run north-south through the Boca area, with Federal Highway (US-1) near the coast and State Road A1A on the barrier island. Glades Road, Palmetto Park Road and Yamato Road are the main east-west roads. Boca Raton has two passenger rail stations. Tri-Rail stops at 680 Yamato Road off I-95 exit 48B, with free parking and Palm Tran connections. Brightline opened its downtown station at 101 NW 4th Street, next to the library and across from Mizner Park, on December 21, 2022.
Boaters reach the ocean through the Boca Raton Inlet, the southernmost of Palm Beach County’s four inlets, which connects Lake Boca Raton and the Intracoastal Waterway to the Atlantic. The city funds annual dredging of the inlet’s interior and periodic dredging of its ebb shoal to keep the channel navigable. Boca Raton Airport, next to FAU, is a general aviation airport used mainly by private and corporate aircraft.