Boca Raton, Florida

Boca Raton ("bōkə rə-tōn") is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida incorporated in May 1925. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 74,764. The majority of population using the postal address of Boca Raton are not actual residents of Boca Raton, and thus 120,000 people who do not live within the incorporated city are not counted as population. The number of people using the postal address Boca Raton is about 200,000.

Boca Raton is the largest city between West Palm Beach and Pompano Beach. On November 2, 2004, the Boca Raton city limits increased the city land area to 29.6 square miles (77 km²). According to the U.S. Census estimates of 2005, the city had a population of 86,629. The name "Boca Ratones" originally appeared on eighteenth century maps associated with an inlet in the Biscayne Bay area of Miami. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term was mistakenly moved north to its current location on most maps and applied to Lake Boca Raton, whose inlet was closed at the time.

The city's early history was as the site of Addison Mizner's Boca Raton Hotel. The "pink hotel" today is visible from miles away as a towering building on the Intracoastal Waterway. Japanese farmers of the Yamato Colony converted the land west of the city into pineapple plantations beginning in 1904. During World War II much of their land was confiscated and used as the site of the Boca Raton Army Air Force Base, a major training facility for B-29 bomber crews. Much of the airbase was later donated to become the grounds of Florida Atlantic University, many of whose parking lots are former runways of the airbase, while part of the airbase is now used as Boca Raton Airport. The Japanese heritage of the Yamato Colony survives in the name of Yamato Road (NW 51st Street) just north of the airport and at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens northwest of the city.