History of Boca Resort & Club subject of upcoming book
July 13th 2008
By Dale M. King
CITY EDITOR
Most people associate the Boca Raton Resort & Club with the influential architect who designed it, Addison Mizner.
But Mizner owned “The Hotel” for less than a year. Florida’s land boom went bust, and the Mizner Development Corp. went belly-up, said Susan Gillis, curator of the Boca Raton Historical Society.
“A lot of what has been written about the resort has not been well-researched,” Gillis noted. So she and historian Dr. Donald Curl are writing a book called “Mizner’s Inn: A History of the Boca Raton Resort & Club.”
Not only is it intended to correct some historical inaccuracies, but to tell a story about the resort that had such an impact on making Boca Raton the city it is today, Gillis told the Boca Raton News.
“I think people will find it interesting,” she said.
It is being published by History Press and should be available in four to five months.
Actually, Clarence Geist bought Mizner’s holdings in 1927 after he went bankrupt. And that included a lot of property in and around the beach as well as the resort itself.
But Geist added substance to Mizner’s style by doing some “pivotal” things, Gillis said. “The town would not have existed were it not for Clarence Geist.” He was the one who urged the community to put in a water treatment plant, a train depot, an airplane landing strip “and a lot of the amenities that helped the city grow.”
Mizner, the book notes, was at the nexus of a perfect storm. Not only did the land boom crash, but in 1926, the area was hit by a hurricane that dwarfed Andrew. Two years later, another storm slammed the Lake Okeechobee area.
Geist Survived
Geist managed to survive, she said. The book recalls a time in Boca history when “half the people worked at ‘The Hotel’ and the other half picked beans,” said Gillis. The hotel closed in the summer for many years – until the 1950s when Arthur Vining Davis, creator of Arvida, took over.
“The Boca Resort Beach Club was an Arvida thing,” said Gillis. He also built the Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club.
The 30,000-word book illustrated with 120 photos takes the Resort & Club right up to its current owner, the Blackstone Group. The last chapter will tell of contemporary changes at the facility.
Gillis, archivist at the historical society for six years, wrote “Boom Time Boca,” a story of the city in the 1920s.
Curl is an architectural historian and local historian. In addition to his co-authorship of Boca Raton’s primary community history, “Boca Raton: A Pictorial History,” he has served as editor of the BRHS publication Spanish River Papers. Curl’s pivotal 1984 publication “Mizner’s Florida: America’s Resort Architecture” helped reestablished the supremacy of Addison Mizner as the reigning architect of the Mediterranean Revival style so popular in Florida in the 1920s and 1930s.
Dale M. King can be reached at 561-549-0832 or at dking@bocanews.com.
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