What's In A Name?

Over its storied history, The Boca Raton has had several different lives.

By Susan Gillis

In 1925, architect Addison Mizner, responsible for the remarkable metamorphosis of Palm Beach from Cape Cod to Mediterranean Revival style, decided to try his hand at the favorite hobby of the day: real estate development.

Along with his roguish brother Wilson and impressive client backers with names like duPont and Vanderbilt, Mizner Development Corporation was born. Its project: the complete transformation of a tiny farming village on the coast in southern Palm Beach County known as “Boca Raton.”

Mizner’s ambitious plans for the “Dream City of the Western World” included mansions, villas, shopping centers, theaters, a “cabaret ship,” golf courses, yacht club, an airport, and more. Of course, he needed a hotel. The “Castillo del Rey” was to be a thousand-room hotel, “the world’s most complete and artistic hostelry.” Soon thereafter, Ritz-Carlton Hotels took over the hotel project, using Mizner and architectural firm Warren and Wetmore, designers of Grand Central Terminal, for the interiors. This meant a delay in construction—in fact, it was never built. Meanwhile, Mizner realized he needed a hotel to house prospective land investors; Boca Raton didn’t even boast a boarding house at the time. The result was the 100-room “Cloister Inn,” which opened on the western shore of Lake Boca Raton in February of 1926. The new hotel’s first brochure advertised it as the “Ritz Carlton Cloister.”

Despite opening to rave reviews, the Cloister Inn would only operate for a few months in early 1926 and again in 1927. The Florida land boom was going bust, although few in the midst of the “era of wonderful nonsense,” as some have called it, realized it. Most of Mizner’s plans for what he called “the world’s greatest resort” did not materialize. By July of 1927, the Mizner Development Corporation (MDC) was bankrupt—along with almost every other developer in southern Florida. The Florida East Coast Railway’s embargo on building supplies, bad publicity, and the 1926 Miami hurricane all contributed to the demise of the boom—and worse was to follow.

Mizner investor Clarence Geist, a Philadelphia utilities magnate, and part-time Palm Beach snowbird, managed to acquire the assets of Mizner’s Boca Raton project for $72,000 in November of 1927. This included millions of dollars of property, including a beachfront that nobody wanted. Geist optimistically believed that the economy would revive; unfortunately, he was incorrect.

Geist was an avid golfer; he already owned a summertime golf resort called “Seaview” in New Jersey. He needed a wintertime golf resort to go with it. The major asset of the MDC property was the Cloister Inn. Despite the fact that the Cloister boasted three golf courses, Geist had two new courses built and hired New York architects Schultze and Weaver to triple the size of the Cloister Inn. Schultze and Weaver were responsible for the Breakers in Palm Beach and the Biltmore in Coral Gables. In addition, Geist hired Palm Beach designer Ohan S. Berberyan to redecorate what was the rather stark, almost medieval look of the Cloister into a more luxurious, comfortable palace of about 400 rooms.

The new hotel opened as “The Boca Raton Club” officially in January of 1930. The Club in these years prided itself on its privacy. Few tourists coming down the coast had any idea what lay beyond the towers visible from the road. The Club’s postcards from that era identified it as “Near Delray Beach” since nobody knew where Boca Raton was at the time. It functioned technically as a club, with only members and their guests allowed. Unlike the swanky Palm Beach hotels, there was no publicity about its social activities or guests. New York Daily News reporter Nancy Randolph referred to it as a “snorty resort,” and “harder to crash than the gate at Tuxedo Park.” This made it a very desirable destination for people who eschewed the limelight.

Geist passed away in 1938; the Club never turned a profit, and the Great Depression meant he had subsidized the hotel’s operation throughout the decade. Florence Geist continued to run the Club after her husband’s death. By 1942, America had entered WWII, and Boca Raton was chosen as the site for a new Army Air Force base. The Club was leased by the military to house initial operations while the base was built west of Dixie Highway. The Tampa Tribune reported, “Army to Lease Swanky Resort on East Coast.” It was, indeed, glamorous—at least for a while. A beautiful tropical setting with colorful bougainvillea climbing the hotel’s walls surrounded the soldiers, who came quite literally from all over the U.S. The Garden Pool and golf courses became training areas, and the antique furniture and carpets were packed away to prevent damage from the thousands of young soldiers. Curiously, the hotel did not receive a new name, unlike the Breakers in Palm Beach, which became Ream General Hospital for the duration.

In 1944, hotelier J. Myer Schine purchased the hotel, and the military prepared to evacuate the premises. Despite the difficulties of wartime travel due to restrictions and rationing, the Club, now fully a hotel, reopened for guests in January of 1945. Schine would go on to make many changes to the club, as it began morphing from a seasonal, social hotel opened a few months a year to a full-time convention-oriented site. This meant air conditioning and new additions, including dividing the one-time Mizner Dining Room in half horizontally. During Schine’s tenure, the hotel was painted its famous pink color, as most of Schine’s hotels were pink. This happened in roughly 1950.

In sharp contrast to Geist’s era, Schine’s publicity machine employed several names for the hotel and cranked out many advertising brochures, postcards, and full-page newspaper ads. Even before the hotel reopened in 1945, Schine’s publicists paid for an ad in the November 20, 1944, issue of Newsweek. It declared “The Boca Raton” to be “Florida’s Secret Paradise,” formerly a private club now open to a “discriminating clientele.” But they also advertised “The Boca Raton Club” as “America’s finest winter resort hotel” in a 1948 ad and “The Boca Raton Hotel and Club” in 1950, perhaps covering all fronts. Postcards from this era proclaimed it “this fabulous Paradise of the Western World.”

In 1956, Arthur Vining Davis, one of the wealthiest men in the world, purchased the hotel and a great deal of Boca Raton property. His Arvida development agency (drawn from the first letters of his name) became one of the most successful real estate firms in U.S. history. Arvida would operate the hotel for many years as the Boca Raton Hotel and Club. Advertising for the hotel was, unlike the Schine era, wrapped into Arvida’s aggressive drive to build more and better gated communities in the rapidly expanding city of Boca Raton; the hotel was just one of the many projects Arvida was selling. In the late 1960s, Arvida added the 26-floor tower to the complex, and a new convention center where Harborside Pool Club is today; he also extended the seawalls to accommodate yachts and charter boats on the lakefront. Formerly openair areas were filled in to add much-needed space to what was now a fully convention-oriented hotel. Marketing materials, trying to reach a younger audience, sometimes referred to “The Boca” in their literature.

In 1980, Arvida completed the $20 million Boca Beach Club on the site of the never-built Castillo del Rey. The new hotel replaced the aging and aptly named Cabana Club, which comprised a pool, dining room, and cabanas overlooking the ocean at Via Cabana on A1A south of the inlet. Today the Addison Condos stand there. The Beach Club was to be a “social hotel,” according to manager Scott Morrison.

It had 212 rooms and 142 oceanfront cabanas on a beautiful oceanfront setting and naturally, at the time, eclipsed the aging historic structure in terms of marketing. VMS Realty Partners acquired the hotel in 1983, which began a number of improvements to the property. In the mid-1980s, 100,000 new hotel rooms were built in Florida, and even “The Hotel” in Boca Raton started experiencing serious competition. As a result, management launched an ambitious rebranding effort in order to attract younger patrons. The hotel was renamed “Boca Raton Resort & Club.”

Note the ampersand—not the word “and”—which became an important feature of this new brand. The idea behind this was to sell not only the historic hotel, the tower, and the new beach club, but many amenities like the renovated tennis courts, golf course, and newly acquired Boca Golf and Tennis Club, which acted as the hotel’s country club. Before, the hotel’s publicity featured an image with the catchphrase “Quite Simply the Best.” New marketing strategies included not just photos of architectural features but images of patrons enjoying the facilities with the slogan “the elegant place to play.”In 1993, the Boca Raton Hotel and Club Limited Management acquired the resort and began major improvements, such as the addition of the new Tennis and Fitness Center and the start of a huge new convention center. H. Wayne Huizenga, a well-known local entrepreneur and owner of the three South Florida professional sports teams, acquired the resort in 1997. In 1998, the Mizner Center opened with four ballrooms and 80,000 square feet of space. It would become the go-to venue for all sorts of community events as well as convention patrons. In 2001, Spa Palazzo brought luxurious new services to the hotel, and in 2002, Yacht Club added 112 rooms and suites to the complex.

In 2004, the Blackstone Group purchased the hotel, and LXR Luxury Resorts became managers of the site. LXR made major changes to older parts of the hotel, including the addition of Palm Court and new restaurants. But its major focus was a complete overhaul of the Boca Beach Club, which reopened in 2009.

MSD partners became the newest owners of the hotel in 2019, in the midst of the worldwide pandemic. The new owners took advantage of the downtime to complete more major renovations of Tower and Cloister portions of the hotel in addition to the landscaping and exterior venues beginning in 2021. They also painted Cloister a coastal white—the first time since the late 1940s it had been so. In honor of the major changes, they launched a name change. The Boca Raton Resort & Club would become “The Boca Raton”—ironically, the very name long-ago owner Mr. Schine had used.