Boca Started Preserving Beaches In ’60s

Q: How did Boca Raton manage to save all that prime oceanfront property for beach parks?
A: In the early 1960s, city leaders imagined a scene that gave them nightmares: A column of condominiums marching like giant soldiers up State Road A1A from Broward County.
Between 1965 and 1973, voters approved seven bond issues that raised about $33 million. They bought hundreds of acres of property, much of it oceanfront, now estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The wooded parks, some on the west side, with tunnels under A1A to the beach, are among the most popular in Palm Beach County and draw beachgoers from throughout South
Florida.
The county also stepped in to buy what is now South Inlet park, just south of the Boca Raton Inlet.
In a 1988 interview, former city manager Jim Rutherford, who died of cancer at 67 in 1999, called the beach buy “probably the single most important decision that this city made in the last 25 to 30 years.”
One of the unsung heroes was a Miami hotel developer named J. Myer Schine. He briefly owned the Boca Raton Resort and Club and also had substantial property in Boca Raton, much of it oceanfront, said Bob Langford, director of the Greater Boca Raton Beach & Park District. The special taxing district, which extends west past the city limits, was created in 1974 to buy and maintain public lands along the beach and in other parts of the Boca Raton area.
Langford said Schine held back on development until money could be raised to buy the tracts.
“Schine, I believe, genuinely wanted the public to own that property,” Langford said.
Boca Raton Historical Society: 395-6766.
Read More: Boca Raton: A Pictorial History, by Donald Curl and John Johnson.