Sun bathers enjoy Boca Raton's surf.
1920s land boom accounts for why so many places are marking their 100th birthdays
More local history stories: HIghland Beach: How town grew from wilderness to prime destination in 75 years; Boynton Beach: City’s oldest house gets one more chance for a new life; Delray Beach: Cemetery may be fit for national historic recognition
By Jane Musgrave
Janet DeVries Naughton is nagged by a book on her to-do list. If and when she gets time to write it, she knows what she will call it: 1925.
It’s a no-brainer, said Naughton, a prolific writer who teaches history at Palm Beach State College and is former president of the Boynton Beach Historical Society.
“That was the prime year,” Naughton said. “It was the biggest land boom bubble we’ve ever seen.”
West Palm Beach attorney Harvey Oyer III, a local historian and author who is a descendant of Boynton Beach pioneers, agreed.
In a few short years following World War I, Florida overall and Palm Beach County in particular were transformed.
For roughly five years, beginning in 1920, the county’s farm fields and mosquito-infested swamps became magnets for industrialists, architects, builders and thousands of others looking to get rich while basking in perpetual sunshine.
“It actually makes today’s growth look slow,” said Oyer.
People would line up for hours outside real estate offices to buy land sight unseen. After they bought the mystery property, many would go to the end of the line and sell it for an instant profit.
“It was a crazy time,” Oyer said. “It was like the wild, wild west.”
The land boom, which was burst by the combined forces of deadly hurricanes that cut off routes for building materials and the 1929 stock market crash that drove the country into the Great Depression, changed the face of the region.
A record-setting 30 of Florida’s 411 towns and cities were incorporated in 1925. Boca Raton and Gulf Stream, along with Jupiter and Deerfield Beach, were among them.
Entertainment venues, like the Lake Worth Playhouse and the Gulf Stream Golf Club, opened while the Delray Beach golf course began to take shape.
Families that flocked to the county needed schools for their children. In 1925, a new high school opened in Delray Beach. The buildings now house the Crest Theatre and the vintage gym as part of the city’s iconic arts complex, Old School Square.
As the population grew, police and fire protection were also needed. Boynton Beach in 1924 established its first Fire Department, an all-volunteer force that would remain so for nearly 30 years.
Now, not surprising, the various places are celebrating their past, their longevity and their contributions to the area. Here’s a look at those that not just survived but flourished and their unique plans to mark their centennials.
Public safety was one of a town’s first duties.
The first Boca Raton fire station (and police station, library and Town Hall) is now home to the historical society.
Dancing and fishing got top billing at this shack in Boca Raton. Photos provided by the Boca Raton and the Delray Beach historical societies
Boca Raton
The city’s history is wound tightly to famed architect Addison Mizner. Best remembered (incorrectly, according to city historian Susan Gillis) for strolling the city with his pet monkey while dressed in a bathrobe, he came to Boca Raton from Palm Beach. He arrived shortly before Boca Raton was incorporated as Boca Ratone on Aug. 2, 1924, and then, as simply Boca Raton, on May 26, 1925.
Snapping up tens of thousands of acres, Mizner said that his Mizner Development Corp. would create “a resort as splendid in its entirety as Palm Beach is in spots.”
But, according to Gillis, curator for the Boca Raton Historical Society, Boca Raton’s gain was Boynton Beach’s loss. Mizner originally planned to build his “Dream City of the Western World” along the ocean in Boynton, what is now Ocean Ridge.
But Mizner angered Boynton’s mayor and its residents by ripping up State Road A1A in the middle of the night to create direct beachfront access for his planned palatial community.
Shunned in Boynton, he shifted his attention to Boca Raton, where he was named town planner. Many of his grandiose ideas, such as making El Camino Real a 20-lane highway, never materialized.
Bankruptcy thwarted his plans.
Still, his influence is everywhere, from the famed resort and club now known as The Boca Raton, to the Schmidt Boca Raton History Museum, to a smattering of houses in the Spanish Village and the Old Floresta Historic District neighborhoods.
The city has already begun its centennial celebration with a contest, challenging residents to write an “Ode to Boca” in five lines, with each line containing the number of words in their ZIP codes. (For instance, if your ZIP code is 33427, the first two lines would each have three words, etc.) Entries are due by May.
Other events planned include Boca Street Fest on Jan. 25; a Centennial Cup golf tournament in February; a centennial concert at Mizner Park Amphitheater on May 24; a centennial drone show at Boca Raton Innovation Campus on May 25, and a centennial-themed holiday parade in December.
The parking lot and landscaping have changed a little, but the exterior of the Gulf Stream Golf Club still keeps its 1920s Mizner style. Photos provided by Boynton Beach City Library, Boca Raton Historical Society and Delray Beach Historical Society
Gulf Stream
Mizner’s influence extended to nearby Gulf Stream. He designed the regal clubhouse while famed golf course architect Donald Ross laid out the greens and fairways at the Gulf Stream Golf Club, which opened in March 1924. The club celebrated its 100th birthday in March.
Members of the town’s civic association are planning ways to mark Gulf Stream’s 1925 incorporation. In February, a dinner will be held at the Little Club, a private golf course that was built on the town’s former polo grounds where the town took root.
The family of Henry Phipps Jr., who along with Andrew Carnegie founded the company that became U.S. Steel, saw Gulf Stream as an ideal place to build a golf course, polo fields and seasonal homes.
The Phipps real estate company filed papers to incorporate the town. The company wanted to call it Phipps Beach, but it was known as Gulf Stream and the name stuck.
The polo fields along the Intracoastal Waterway established Gulf Stream as the “Winter Polo Capital of the World.” Hundreds of people, some in yachts, watched the matches.
With land values skyrocketing, the Phipps family sold the fields for homesites in the 1960s, sending polo to the county’s western reaches.
Kirsten Stanley, president of the civic association, said she lives in one of the six surviving “polo houses” where star players spent the season.
More events, such as a Gulf Stream Gives Back Day organized with a nonprofit, are planned to celebrate the centennial, she said.
Lake Worth Playhouse
Lake Worth Playhouse
The county’s oldest working theater and its oldest art deco building has been through a lot in its 100-year history, says Michael McKeich, a local historian.
Founded by two brothers from Pittsfield, Illinois, it started showing silent movies, then talkies and then, when multiplexes threatened small movie houses throughout the country, it survived on X-rated fare, including, famously, Deep Throat, McKeich said. Since the mid-1970s, it has been home to live community theater.
While its offerings have varied, the building has remained surprisingly unchanged, he said. Its pecky cypress ceilings are still marked with a large “O” and “T,” the logo of Oakley Theatre, its name when Clarence and Lucien Oakley opened it on Nov. 3, 1924.
Four years later, the $150,000 theater was ravaged by the 1928 hurricane, which killed at least 3,000 people in the county, mostly in the Glades.
Less than four months and $50,000 later, the theater reopened, McKeich said.
Having survived Mother Nature, the Oakleys couldn’t survive the financial windstorm brought on by the Great Depression.
In 1931, deeply in debt, Lucien Oakley killed himself. A year later, his brother died of a heart attack, McKeich said.
The building was bought by the Chicago-based Publix Theatres Corp. and renamed the Worth Theatre. (Fun fact: Lakeland grocer George Jenkins, who founded the Publix supermarket chain, named his store after the theater company, fondly remembering the time he spent at the movies.)
In the 1960s, the business fell on hard times again and became the Playtoy Theatre, euphemistically called an “arts theater.” Raided by police, derided by ministers and shunned by elected officials, it eventually closed and fell into disrepair, McKeich said.
In the mid-1970s, the nonprofit Lake Worth Playhouse bought it for $60,000 and refurbished it. With occasional surprise appearances by actor Burt Reynolds, a Jupiter native now deceased, it became a success.
The theater will celebrate its centennial on Dec. 13 with a 1920s-themed party. Guests are encouraged to wear Roaring ’20s-style outfits to watch silent films accompanied by a piano.
Information is available at lakeworthplayhouse.org/special-events.
Delray Beach has grown, but there is no mistaking Old School Square, with the Crest Theatre in the background, as seen from Atlantic Avenue in its early days.
Crest Theatre
Once the home of school plays and high school basketball games, the 100-year-old Crest Theatre and the Vintage Gym, along with its older neighbor, the 1913 Delray Beach Elementary School, for decades have formed the heart of Delray Beach arts.
Renovated and repurposed more than 30 years ago to become Old School Square, the theater and gym that made up the 1925 Delray Beach High School are key spokes in the city’s cultural wheel.
A controversial falling-out in 2021, when the City Commission fired the square’s longtime management company, has divided oversight of the buildings. The city’s Downtown Development Authority manages the Cornell Art Museum in the former elementary school, the gym and outdoor amphitheater. The city oversees the theater.
After years of construction, still not finished, the Creative Arts School reopened in the theater building in November. With questions about the safety of the theater’s balcony and the need to replace rigging and electrical equipment, it is still not known when the estimated $3 million to $5 million project will be underway, much less complete, city executives have told Delray Beach commissioners. City Manager Terrence Moore said there are no current plans to mark the theater’s centennial, according to Gina Carter, city spokesperson.
But Laura Simon, DDA executive director, said her office is working to raise money to have some events to mark the milestones. It is trying to book a national act for a ticketed outside concert, she said. Details for a community celebration, possibly with a Roaring ’20s theme, are still being worked out, she said.
“Our town is all about history,” Simon said. “We want to celebrate it.”
Members of the Cason family, pioneers in Delray Beach.
Cason Cottage
The three-bedroom cottage that serves as home to the Delray Beach Historical Society isn’t the oldest building in town, although it has the most impressive lineage.
The Casons were a formidable force in Delray Beach’s history, said Kayleigh Howald, a historical society archivist. “They were mayors. They were judges. They were doctors. They were community leaders,” she said.
The house was built in 1924 by the Rev. J.R. Cason, who moved to Delray Beach from Arkansas to be closer to his children and grandchildren.
The pastor quickly immersed himself in civic affairs. He served as a municipal judge, was chairman of the Palm Beach County Board of Instruction and founded the Methodist Children’s Home in Volusia County, the first orphanage in the state.
When the 1928 hurricane leveled the First Methodist Church, he returned to the pulpit and helped rebuild the church on Swinton Avenue. It was named in his honor.
Meanwhile, his extended family members were making their marks. One of his sons, Dr. John R. “Roy” Cason Jr., was the town’s first doctor — the only one between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale.
One of his daughters, Jessie Cason, married James Love, the city’s first pharmacist who operated Love’s Drugs on Atlantic Avenue. Love also served as a mayor, town commissioner and a municipal judge.
Another son, Andrew E. “Van” Cason, a banker, Realtor and gasoline wholesaler, built a house across the street from his parents. Dubbed Tarrimore, it is home to Dada restaurant.
The restaurant celebrated Tarrimore’s 100th birthday in May. The historical society, which turned 60 this year, held a barbecue in November to mark its milestone and the 100th anniversary of the cottage.
Boynton’s first volunteer fire department in this 1925 photo.
Boynton Beach Fire Department
The agency’s first fire truck was a two-hose cart pulled by a Model T that belonged to the water department. A year later, technology arrived. It got a used 500-gallon pumper truck that remained in service for at least 43 years.
Originally staffed with volunteers, the department hired two firefighters in 1953, according to the Boynton Beach Times. The paid firefighters were required to work 24-hour shifts every other day. Volunteers relieved them.
Clearly, times have changed.
In a television interview, Chief Hugh Bruder remembered his early career when firefighters hung onto the back of the truck when rushing to calls. “Riding the tailboard,” he called it.
The department celebrated its centennial on Sept. 14 with a community party at Centennial Park & Amphitheater.
A newspaper ad from the 1920s promoted Addison Mizner’s dream community in Boca Raton.
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