From Mizner's Dream City to Mizner Park
Before anyone was drinking coffee under the palm trees on Plaza Real, Boca Raton was mostly just a big idea in Addison Cairns Mizner's mind.
Born in 1872 and gone by 1933, he never saw Mizner Park, never walked by its fountains or colorful buildings, yet the place still shows what he liked: arches, tiles, and a bit of European style added to the Florida landscape.
In the 1920s, he became a well-known architect, giving South Florida a new look with building styles inspired by the Mediterranean and old Spanish designs. These styles made it feel like a bit of Spain had moved in.
He built a surprising number of buildings for what was still mostly a small town: sixty-seven in Palm Beach, twenty-seven in Boca Raton, and ten more around Palm Beach County.
The Everglades Club and the 1926 Boca Raton Hotel showed off his style with smooth walls, rounded clay roofs, arches, covered walkways, columns, and small, detailed decorations that you notice if you walk slowly.
In 1925, he tried to turn Boca into a carefully planned vacation city.
The land boom ended the next year, the project was left unfinished and ran out of money, and the city's growth slowed, with fewer than a thousand people living there by the middle of the century.
Many years later, when leaders wanted to bring new energy to a struggling downtown, Mizner's name, which sounded romantic, a little sad, and safe from the past, was the only thing they could use without causing problems.
The Rise and Fall of Boca Mall on Federal Highway
Before Mizner Park existed, 31 acres at North Federal Highway and Northeast 2nd Street held the Boca Mall.
Opened in 1974 as a sixteen-million-dollar center, it was designed by Miami architect Lloyd Frank Vann for New Jersey developers Smathers, Plapinger & Aronowitz.
A single level wrapped around a rooftop parking deck, its 405,300 leasable square feet tied together by glass-enclosed elevators.
Britts, a two-level, one-hundred-thousand-square-foot department store on the south end, opened on November 4, 1974; the Miami-based Jefferson Store, 125,000 square feet on two levels at the north end, followed on November 14.
The grand opening on November 29 brought twenty-five stores and eventually more than seventy tenants, including Walgreens, GNC, Thom McAn, Rock of Ages Records, Florida's thirteenth Orange Bowl snack bar, and an AMC six-screen theater that began showing films in August 1975.
Then, Town Center at Boca Raton opened 2.6 miles away in 1980. Britts closed in January 1982 and then gave way to Levitz Furniture in 1985.
Mismanagement, flood-prone parking lots, and a dispiriting tenant mix turned the mall into what residents likened to a big blimp hangar.
A dive bar inside gained local fame and helped popularize the term.
In August 1989, after protracted lease disputes with Christy's Dive Bar and other holdout tenants, demolition crews started to erase the complex, leaving a void in downtown.
From Bonds to Pavers: How Mizner Park Was Born
By the time the Boca Mall closed, downtown Boca Raton had emptied because the rest of the city was doing so well.
Neighborhoods and office parks were busy, but the downtown area had only seventy-three homes and cheap office space.
To fix this, the Boca Raton Community Redevelopment Agency created a Downtown Redevelopment Plan in 1982 and, in 1986, a Beautification Plan that suggested building an Arts Park as the main feature.
Tom Crocker stepped in to help.
After taking over his father William's business and turning it into Crocker & Company in 1986, he had already built almost 2 million square feet of office and mixed-use buildings when he joined the CRA to work together with the city.
The idea was bold for Boca: buy the 30-acre Boca Mall property, tear it down, and build a new neighborhood with parks, places for the arts, stores, offices, and homes.
Voters approved the plan in January 1989, authorizing 68 million dollars in bonds.
Of a 56.6 million dollar project budget, 38.5 million went to land, 3.5 million to infrastructure and park improvements, and 14.6 million to capitalized interest and issuance costs, with another 50 million from the city for surrounding infrastructure.
The CRA bought the land and gave the developer four long-term leases on 12 acres.
Cooper Carry, a company from Atlanta, designed Mizner Park to look like a Mediterranean-style town center, with stucco walls and red tile roofs around a long park.
The courtyards, fountains, and walkways brought together public spaces and private life.
Cartoons and Canvases at Mizner Park
Mizner Park officially opened on January 11, 1991, with construction continuing in phases through the 1990s.
On opening day, CRA chair Jamie Snyder looked down the palm-lined street and declared that downtown now had a heart.
That heart was mixed-use: an eight-screen cinema, seven restaurants, forty-seven shops, 272 residential units, and a 170,000 square foot office building.
By build out, commercial space was about 90 percent leased and assessed at over 113 million dollars, making Mizner Park the largest taxpayer in the redevelopment area.
Culture arrived quickly. In 1992, cartoonist Mort Walker moved his Museum of Cartoon Art from Port Chester, New York, into a 56,500 square foot home at Mizner Park.
Renamed the International Museum of Cartoon Art and opened to the public in 1996, it showed original work by Disney artists and the illustrators of Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, and other comic strip fixtures.
The museum, which fought low attendance and the bankruptcies of two corporate sponsors, survived briefly on a one-million-dollar Hearst Foundation grant in 1998, then closed in 2002.
In 2008, its collection joined Ohio State's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
Meanwhile, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, founded in 1950 as the Art Guild, committed in 1997 to build at Mizner Park.
Architect Donald Singer produced a 44,000 square foot building that nodded to Mizner motifs and opened in January 2001.
The museum expanded galleries and meeting rooms and serves 200,000 visitors a year with contemporary art, photography, non-Western work, glass, and sculpture.
Stages and Festivals at Mizner Park Amphitheater
The Centre for the Arts at Mizner Park was planned as three main parts. The first part was the Boca Raton Museum of Art.
The second part, finished in November 2002, was the Count de Hoernle Amphitheater, a 6.2 million dollar outdoor venue set behind columns and fountains at the north end of Plaza Real.
The amphitheater has 3,520 permanent seats and can hold about 4,200 people in total for general-admission shows.
Its stage is 2,440 square feet, or almost 5,900 with the sides included, and has built-in sound and lighting.
Henrietta Rach de Hoernle led the opening, followed by a Florida Symphony Orchestra performance, bringing together giving, culture, and community pride.
A large festival tent, about 22,000 square feet, can be set up over the concert lawn to seat about 2,600 people, making the amphitheater usable in any weather.
Since it opened, the venue has welcomed more than a million people at seafood and music festivals, holiday events, and gatherings that sometimes seem planned to look spontaneous.
In 2010, the city took over and changed the official name to Mizner Park Amphitheater. This made the venue sound less like it was named after a donor and more like a public park.
The third part of the Centre for the Arts, a planned 1,400-seat indoor theater, has not been built yet and remains a hopeful final piece of the plan.
Streets, Shops, and Everyday Life at Mizner Park
Day to day, Mizner Park announces itself along Plaza Real, the promenade that ties the project together. Designers laid 1.2 million pavers by hand, using different colors to mark parking spaces instead of paint.
Four fountains, including the Snyder Fountain in the middle, and three iron gazebos break up the walkway, while rows of royal and Washingtonian palm trees line the path.
Benches, small gardens, and lawns are close together so people can easily find shade or a place to sit.
Parking garages are placed at the edges so the main streets can be closed for festivals, turning the center into a walkway for people, cooled by how the buildings are set up to let air move through.
The result was once called the postmodern reincarnation of nineteenth-century Paris and Barcelona, which may be ambitious but is not entirely wrong on a cool winter evening.
In 2010, the American Planning Association named Plaza Real one of the nation's Great Public Spaces, and the Environmental Protection Agency praised Mizner Park for replacing a blighted site with a civic meeting ground.
Around the promenade, retail tenants include Rh Outlet, Tommy Bahama, Sur La Table, J. McLaughlin, Sugarboo & Co., Birch Lane, and Strike 10.
Restaurants such as Villagio, Kapow Noodle Bar, It's Sugar, Max's Grille, Eddie V's, Yard House, American Social, Calaveras Cantina, Sloan's Ice Cream, Starbucks, and Crema Gourmet keep the sidewalks busy late into the evening.
Centennial Facelifts and an Unfinished Future
In the six years before the downtown plan, only 75,000 square feet of new building went up downtown; afterward, the CRA approved sixty projects totaling over 3.5 million square feet.
Housing units rose from seventy-three in the 1980s to 689 by 2002, office rents climbed from the lowest in Palm Beach County to the highest in South Florida, and assessed property values increased fourteenfold, so that by 2005, Mizner Park was paying for itself and serving as a model for cities that turn malls into town centers.
In October 2022, Boca Raton approved a $115 million Center for Arts and Innovation at Mizner Park, to be designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and funded by private donors.
The plan centered on a 1,100-seat main theater and a redesigned 3,500-seat amphitheater, plus venues and a rooftop terrace.
Still, on January 8, 2025, after disputes over lease terms and funding requirements, the Center ended its 2022 land lease agreement with the city.
Even without the new center, Mizner Park was tuned for Boca Raton's centennial.
On December 9, 2024, the Community Redevelopment Agency approved $800,000 for work on public areas, with Crocker Downtown Development Associates overseeing repairs to fountains, paint, landscaping, sod, pavers, gazebos, and street furniture finished in black and gold to match the amphitheater.
Private owners were expected to follow, keeping in place a 30-acre, 770,000-square-foot open-air district where retail, offices, and cultural venues animate a downtown that was once almost empty.
Addison Mizner's own resort city never materialized, but the place that bears his name has become South Florida's favorite demonstration of what to do with a second chance.
