Boca Raton Is Having Two Centennials at Once, and Most Residents Only Noticed One

"As we mark Boca Raton's Centennial, Summer in the City is the perfect way to bring the community together through the universal language of music," said Amy DiNorscio, the city's Amphitheater & Community Events Manager, when the free concert series was first tied to the anniversary at Mizner Park Amphitheater.

That same series just wrapped its 2026 run. This year's schedule ran select Fridays from June 12 through August 7, closing with the 6th Annual Battle of the Bands under the amphitheater lights. If you blinked, you missed it. And if you assumed that closing show also closed the book on Boca Raton's hundredth birthday, you're only half right. The city's centennial calendar has, in fact, mostly emptied out. But a few miles away, behind a different set of gates, a second and largely separate hundred-year milestone is only now hitting its stride.

Two Different Buildings Are Turning 100

Boca Raton incorporated as a city on May 26, 1925. That's the anniversary the drone shows, the sold-out Weezer and Fountains of Wayne concert, and the centennial-themed Holiday Street Parade were built around. Before the "e" got dropped from the name in 1925, the area had appeared on sixteenth-century maps as "Boca de Ratones," and the incorporation date is the one the city treats as its official birthday.

The Boca Raton, the Mizner-era resort that most people still call by its old name, opened its doors on February 6, 1926. That's a different building, a different owner, and a different hundred-year clock. This year's celebration there isn't a city program. It's the resort marking its own centennial, on its own calendar, largely inside its own property line.

Here's the split, in plain terms:

Most of what residents actually experienced over the past year came from the left column. The right column is happening right now, and unless you're a member or a guest, you've probably driven past it without knowing it was there.

The City's Party Already Closed Its Calendar

If you're still hoping to catch the headline centennial events, you're too late for the big ones. The sold-out Weezer and Fountains of Wayne show at Mizner Park Amphitheater happened on May 24, 2025, followed the next night by a synchronized drone show over the Boca Raton Innovation Campus that closed with fireworks. The 53rd Annual Holiday Street Parade, built around the centennial theme with more than 60 floats, ran down Federal Highway on December 3, 2025. And as of this month, Summer in the City has closed for the season too.

None of that is coming back. What's left of the city's own centennial programming is quieter, ongoing, and easy to miss if you're not looking for it.

What Carries Forward, and Doesn't Require an Invitation

Two pieces of the city's centennial outlast the concerts and parades, and neither one needs a ticket.

Sanborn Square, at 72 N Federal Hwy, launched a monthly Night Market on October 2, 2025, with the city branding the run as its "2025–26 Night Market Season" and describing it as keeping the centennial "glowing well into 2026." Like the city's outdoor farmers markets, it follows a fall-through-spring rhythm rather than running year-round, with food vendors, local artisans, live music, and a mobile bar turning the small downtown park into an evening gathering spot. The city also added free rides to and from the market through BocaConnect, its newer shuttle service. If the season follows the same calendar as last year, expect it back at Sanborn Square this fall.

The other is more permanent than an event: forty native shade trees now line the walking and running trail at Spanish River Athletic Park, planted as part of the city's Centennial Grove project with Community Greening. It's not programming you attend once. It's landscape you can walk through on any given morning, and it will outlast every concert on the list above.

The Other Hundredth Birthday Is Happening Behind a Different Gate

While the city's centennial winds down, The Boca Raton's is just getting going, and its version of the celebration reads less like a concert series and more like a running historical exhibit for members and guests.

The resort has opened a new Cloister Inn Museum, built in partnership with the Boca Raton Historical Society, tracing its Mizner-era roots with rare artifacts and original furnishings. Visitors are greeted by a newly commissioned portrait of Addison Mizner, painted by local artist Serge Strosberg, who also has a separate collection on view depicting Mizner and his pet monkey, Johnnie Brown. The resort is marking the milestone with a Palm Beach Opera concert staged outdoors in the Spa Palmera Garden, featuring arias and operettas meant to evoke the 1920s, and a golf gala inviting members to dress in vintage attire in honor of Tommy Armour, the "Silver Scot" who became the resort's Director of Golf in 1926, the same year the property opened. There's also a hardcover commemorative volume on the resort's history, available now at Assouline at Boca Chica.

None of that requires a city calendar or a free shuttle. Most of it requires a room key or a membership card. It's the same hundred-year story the city told in 2025, just told from inside the building where it actually started, and on the resort's own 2026 timeline rather than the city's 2025 one.

The Museum Is Where Both Timelines Overlap

If there's a place where a resident without a resort membership can still touch part of this bigger historical moment, it's the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Mizner Park. The museum's Grand Hall has been showing RKYIA since November 2025, an installation of 25 paintings from New York painter Tobi Kahn's Sky and Water series, made between 2003 and 2025 and given to the museum as a gift. It hangs alongside Al Held's large-scale mural, Mantegna's Edge, which already anchored that space before Kahn's paintings arrived.

That installation is separate from something bigger still to come. The museum has announced that Kahn's first comprehensive survey exhibition, which it organized itself, will debut in Boca Raton this fall before traveling nationally. For a museum that already sits inside a Mizner-adjacent downtown built during the era both centennials are celebrating, hosting the first stop of a nationally touring survey is a genuinely new marker on the city's cultural calendar, not a repeat of last year's centennial programming.

What This Means If You Live Here

If you assumed Boca's hundredth birthday ended with the December parade or the August concert series, you weren't wrong about the city's own calendar. But the building most people picture when they think of old Boca Raton, the one Addison Mizner actually built, is having its own quieter hundred-year moment right now, on a 2026 timeline the city's centennial didn't set and doesn't control. Some of it you can walk into for free at Sanborn Square or under new tree canopy at Spanish River Athletic Park. Some of it you'll only see if you already have a reason to be inside The Boca Raton's gates. Either way, the story isn't finished just because the fireworks already went off.

If you're weighing what a piece of this city's history is actually worth in today's market, whether it's a home near the trail at Spanish River Athletic Park or something closer to the Mizner-era streets downtown, Weppner Group has spent more than three decades reading Boca Raton block by block. Schedule a private consultation with The Weppner Group when you're ready to talk specifics.