Cloister at 100 endures as monument to Addison Mizner’s dream deferred
The Cloister as it appears today, 100 years after it opened in 1926. It’s now one of five hotels at The Boca Raton. Photo provided BELOW RIGHT: The main entrance to the hotel was simpler in 1926. Photo provided by Boca Raton Historical Society
By Holly Baltz
Nearly 50 years before the vision of a certain Imagineer put Florida on the map as a year-round resort destination, Addison Mizner wanted the same thing as he built his “dream city” of Boca Raton.
The famed architect, after bringing his distinctive Mediterranean Revival style to the Everglades Club and more than 30 homes on Palm Beach in the mid-1920s, wanted to make his mark with the “first tailor-made city in the world.”
Its centerpiece was the 100-room Ritz-Carlton Cloister Inn, an ultra-exclusive, $1 million hotel, which opened 100 years ago and was slated to entertain guests year-round. Today, it is one of five hotels at The Boca Raton and fulfills one of Mizner’s dreams as visitors flock there from not only around the nation but the world.
“The next step is to keep the Florida populous with happy, contented visitors in June as in January,” Mizner told the Miami Herald in March 1926, a month after the Cloister Inn had opened and in announcing a campaign to improve Florida’s roads to bring tourists to the state. “The time is right for us to branch out as a 12-month’s resort instead of being regarded merely as a winter playground.”
A planned community
Until Mizner cast his eye south, Boca Raton was a small farming community.
But that started to change in 1925 when Mizner and his brother Wilson formed the Mizner Development Corp. and bought 2 miles of waterfront property on what is now the Intracoastal Waterway with 18,000 acres adjoining it.
Everything from boulevards to waterways to villas, gardens and golf courses would be coordinated, an early planned community of the kind that would dominate the South Florida landscape a century later.
Mizner had the money backers to bring it to reality: Sen. T. Coleman du Pont of Delaware, the Vanderbilts, England’s Duchess of Sutherland, steel magnate Henry Phipps of Pittsburgh and U.S. Rep. George Graham of Philadelphia — all connections he’d made in Palm Beach.
Mizner would design Boca Raton’s City Hall and an Episcopalian Church where he installed another brother, Henry, as rector. He planned golf courses, to be designed by the most famous course architect in the country, Donald Ross, as well as an airport.
Plans for Camino Real called for a grand boulevard — 219 feet wide and at least 20 lanes.
Even the corporation’s headquarters, at the corner of Dixie Highway and Camino Real, was considered a work of art, fashioned after El Greco’s house in Toledo, Spain.
And finally, Mizner would design about 40 homes nearby in the Floresta section of town.
A resort takes shape
Situated on the shores of Lake Boca Raton with a natural inlet and the ocean beyond, the inn would feature yachting, golf, aviation, polo and tennis.
The hotel, the smaller one of two slated resorts, took shape swiftly after 22 weeks of construction despite workers’ wading in waist-deep water through almost impassable vegetation.
Extra care was taken by all to present the most pristine appearance.
Even the lake was beautified. Trees were removed to foster a glass-like surface. A cement factory on site produced “great slabs of granite-like material” in order to “bulkhead the four-mile circumference,” according to a Miami Herald story days after the opening. Mizner also planned to widen and deepen the inlet.
The architect and real estate man aimed to attract year-round travelers with the balmier temperatures coming off the Gulf Stream.
He planned to build his own $1 million castle on a small, man-made island in the north portion of the lake with drawbridge — but it was not to be.
The dining room in 1926 was inspired by a 15th century hospital in Catalonia. Photo provided by Boca Raton Historical Society
The magical first night
The crown jewel of Mizner’s community held its swanky opening on a Saturday night, Feb. 6, 1926.
Guests signed a bound leather guest book that survives under glass at The Boca Raton today. Mizner cleverly placed parchment paper on the pages of what was then a contemporary songbook of Gregorian hymns, according to an article in Architectural Digest, and it gave the appearance of Old World Europe.
The elite of the upper crust attended.
They were “jeweled to the hilt and furred to the teeth,” wrote historian Henry Kinney, according to an article on the Florida State Archives website, floridamemory.com.
“Royalty, Wall Street wealth, the most famous film stars of the day and the ranking hierarchy of Palm Beach and Bal Harbor rubbed shoulders in the throng,” he said.
Dinner was served at 9 p.m., with dancing and grand tours to follow.
Called the most expensive hotel ever built, the inn featured vaulted ceilings, 14-karat gold columns and rooms that cost as much as $10,000 each to furnish.
The guests included philanthropist Mrs. Vincent Astor, prominent investment banker Edward Stotesbury and novelist Theodore Dreiser.
A luxurious design
The prized feature of the inn was its tower, patterned after La Giralda tower in Seville, Spain, and supervised personally by Mizner. He designed room at the top to see the Atlantic Ocean, Lake Boca Raton and surrounding “tropical country.”
Mizner’s own objects d’art adorned the public areas.
Guests entered through a large Romanesque stone arch and great Spanish doors with images at the top of Queen Isabella of Spain’s shield on one side and King Ferdinand’s on the other. From there, they passed into a 1,600-square-foot lobby that was two stories high.
Atop “snow white plaster walls,” as one newspaper described it, was a balcony around the second floor.
A lantern hung in the middle under ceilings with hand-carved beams as guests stepped onto the red-tile floor.
The hotel’s lounge projected over the water with stained glass windows. The arches of the actual cloisters (covered open-air walkways) overlooked the lake.
The Cloister’s cathedral dining room has an ornate ceiling and columns that were originally overlaid with gold leaf. When the hotel was built, the $1 million price tag earned it the moniker ‘the most expensive hotel ever built.’ Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
The dining hall featured 13th century loggia beams resting on giant columns, which were 35 feet tall and inspired by a 15th century hospital in Catalonia. Spanish hand basins lined the walls.
Each guest room was furnished differently. A number had private elevators. A West Palm Beach Mizner furniture factory contributed 220 beds, 120 telephone stands, 100 dressing tables, 110 mirrors, 100 writing tables, 210 three-drawer dressing tables and 350 dining room chairs with two antique cupboards.
The dream unravels
It was a beautiful beginning. But soon after, Mizner’s vision began to unravel.
Already, in the fall before the inn opened, Florida’s land boom was beginning to bust.
Tourists came to visit in the off-season but found few restaurants open and markets without much that was fresh.
Six months after the inn opened, the Hurricane of 1926 sealed its fate.
Hariette Gates and Mary Driscoll at the resort in 1927. Photo provided by Boca Raton Historical Society
In spring 1927, the Mizner Development Corp. went under bankruptcy protection. Later that year, one of its original investors, wealthy utility company owner Clarence Geist, paid $71,500 and assumed $7 million in debt for the inn, oceanfront property, homes and administration buildings.
After $8 million in renovations and 300 more rooms, the Cloister Inn reopened in 1930 as the Boca Raton Club. In 1944 real estate and theater entrepreneur J. Myer Schine bought the club for $3 million and opened it as the Boca Raton Hotel and Club.
In 1988 the property became known as the Boca Raton Resort & Club. MSD Partners acquired the property in 2019 and dubbed it The Boca Raton.
One day short of seven years after the opening of his exclusive hotel, Addison Mizner died in his apartment on Via Mizner in Palm Beach, of a heart attack. It was 1933, during the Great Depression, and he was penniless.
Forty-five years after Mizner’s crown jewel opened, Walt Disney’s dream came to life in Orlando in 1971. Part of his genius was putting the resort in Central Florida where the heat wasn’t as bad as in South Florida and mosquitoes were fewer.
Walt Disney World’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa hosted Mizner’s Lounge from the hotel’s opening in 1988 until 2019, when the resort changed it to a Beauty and the Beast theme.
Comments