Shoppers stroll the newly built Mizner Park in 1991. The park celebrated its 35th birthday Jan. 11. Photo provided by Boca Raton Historical Society
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By Mary Hladky
Residents jam city meetings to protest. The subject consumes hours of debate. Recriminations fly. City leaders are faced with controversial votes.
Does this sound like today’s furor over the planned redevelopment of Boca Raton’s downtown campus? Yes, but it also describes the creation of Mizner Park.
Mizner Park celebrated its 35th birthday on Jan. 11. City leaders say no one can imagine life in Boca Raton without it.
“This is 1988 revisited,” architect Derek Vander Ploeg said of the downtown campus saga. “It is almost exactly the same.”
“It was controversial,” said attorney Wendy Larsen, who was one of a group of five key people who got Mizner Park off the ground. “It was the first new thing that happened downtown. Anytime you are doing a first, it is bound to be hard.”
Asked how complicated the task was, she said, “On a scale of 1 to 10, it was probably a 10.”
Mizner Park was what Larsen described as “really the first of its kind in Florida” — a combination of residential, office, retail and restaurants.
It was to replace the dilapidated Boca Raton Mall and its frequently flooded parking lots that residents had no use for.
That’s generally what developers Terra and Frisbie Group and city officials have in mind for the 31.7-acre downtown campus, although that project as now envisioned would also have a hotel and city buildings.
In both cases, the central idea was to create a popular destination.
Asked about the parallels between opposition then and now, Larsen said, “There is always a group out there who is against progress. Whether or not it is the current design of the downtown campus, something has to be done. I hope it is soon. We have needed a new City Hall for 20 years.”
Deputy City Manager Jorge Camejo headed up the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency when the Mizner Park concept came into being.
“In the early 1980s, there was absolutely no reason to want to be in downtown Boca Raton,” he said in a July episode of Boca Raton Untold, a video series created in partnership with Lynn University’s College of Communication and Design.
“The idea behind Mizner Park was to create a catalyst that would be a great public space and also spur investment throughout the balance of the downtown,” he said.
After the Town Center mall opened in 1980, “something had to be done to save the downtown. The commerce was now going west,” he said. “With Mizner Park, we changed that significantly.”
Its design was inspired by the Piazza Navona in Rome, and that was one of the reasons it was controversial.
The buildings faced a central space with their backs to Federal Highway.
“Back then, that was blasphemous,” Camejo said. “People were outraged.”
At the time, there were almost no residential units in the downtown, but many people panned the idea of including them in Mizner Park. They were proved wrong.
“When we opened Phase 1 in 1990, there were 136 residential units available …” Camejo said. “They went like hotcakes. It was occupied almost instantly.”
Now, Mizner Park is looking bedraggled and could use a refresh. That might be coming.
Brookfield Properties, Mizner Park’s owner, put the property up for sale a year ago, and negotiations with a suitor are underway.
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