Addison Mizner - Boca Raton Development

Boca Raton Development

In 1925 Addison Mizner embarked on his most ambitious project, the creation of a fabulous resort at Boca Raton. Unfortunately, this was at the end of the Florida land boom and it ended in bankruptcy in little more than a year. He began by forming the Mizner Development Corporation, a syndicate of prominent investors including Rodman Wanamaker, Paris Singer, Irving Berlin, William Kissam Vanderbilt II, Elizabeth Arden, Jesse Livermore, Clarence H. Geist, and T. Coleman du Pont as chairman. In March the corporation quietly bought up two miles (3 km) of ocean front property with an overall total of over sixteen hundred acres. On April 15, 1925 the syndicate announced this large development, labeled the "Venice of the Atlantic," which would feature a thousand room hotel, two golf courses, a polo field, parks, and miles of paved and landscaped streets which included a 160-foot-wide (49 m) grand boulevard called Camino Real. In an address before 100 salespeople, the architect declared:

"It is my plan to create a city that is direct and simple... To leave out all that is ugly, to eliminate the unnecessary, and to give Florida and the nation a resort city as perfect as study and ideals can make it."

On the first day of selling lots, May 14, 1925, $2 million was taken in with a further $2 million within the first month. Seeing that the large hotel would take a long time to build, Mizner immediately began work on a 100 room smaller hotel, the Ritz-Carlton Cloister Inn (now called the Boca Raton Resort & Club). Unfortunately for the development, problems with a railroad freight embargo and bad publicity began to appear over the summer. Investors began pulling out beginning with Du Pont in October. By the end of October over $25 million in lots had been sold. Although it was obvious to many that the boom had ended, Mizner doggedly carried on. The Ritz-Carlton Cloister Inn opened on February 6, 1926. Over the winter season an additional $6 million trickled in but sales came to a halt in the spring. Even worse, customers stopped making payments on their contracts and the cash flow ended. This led to Mizner's losing control of the corporation in July 1926 and to bankruptcy in September. The bankruptcy was resolved a year later in November 1927. As well as the Cloister Inn, the corporation had built two large Administration Buildings, a radio station, and twenty-nine homes.