Boca is full of people who came down from New York and New Jersey, and for a lot of them today isn't a history lesson. It's a name they still say out loud. A shift somebody didn't come home from. A morning they can still walk you through minute by minute, twenty five years on, without pausing once.

FAU is holding its memorial ceremony at 8:00 this morning at Flagler Credit Union Stadium, honoring the 2,976 people lost. Right after it, anyone who wants to can take on the stair climb: ten rounds, 2,050 steps, the same 110 floors firefighters went up while everybody else was coming down. Some people climb it in a weight vest or in field gear, the way the first responders did.

Gather at Gate 1 by the flagpoles, park in Lot 5, and come with water. 777 Glades Road.

Source: FAU event page

Today is the good one, so if you're going to be outside this weekend, be outside today.

Let's get into it.

Construction has started on Glades Station, the 28,000 square foot three building complex going up on the triangular lot at Glades Road and Dixie Highway alongside the Brightline tracks. The anchor is only the second Carmine's Gourmet Market ever, a 15 department Italian mega market from Carmine Giardini, who has been running the original up in Palm Beach Gardens since 1988, and it comes with a white tablecloth restaurant and office space attached. Developer Investments Limited got city approval back in December 2023, so this one has been a while coming. Opening is expected in the first quarter of 2027.

Source: Boca Daily News

The planning board voted 7 to 0 to put a 42,000 square foot skate park inside North Park on NW Second Avenue, on what used to be the Ocean Breeze golf course. You get a pump track, two in ground bowls, a snake run and a street course, and it lands right beside the indoor pickleball and padel building already going up on the same property. American Ramp Company out of Joplin, Missouri is designing and building it, and there are no lights planned, so it'll be a daylight park.

The mail wasn't close either, 43 letters in favor and 3 against. The line people keep repeating came from Asher, who is 9 and has been turning up to these meetings for two years. "I've been waiting for this my entire life, and life isn't forever." His dad Rinaldo, who is 50, told the board he can't wait to skate the pump track himself. It still needs a final sign off from city council, and when it opens it replaces the Tim Huxhold park over on Crawford.

Source: Boca Daily News

The schedule did something nobody could have planned. FAU hosts Navy on the weekend of September 11, and the theme is Salute to Service. It's the home opener, it's on ESPNU, so everyone who didn't get tickets still gets to watch, and kickoff is 7:30 at Flagler Credit Union Stadium on campus. Go Owls.

Source: FAU Sports

Gumbo Limbo has quietly put together the best weekend in Boca and then barely told anyone about it, which is very much their style. Saturday morning you can paddle out through the Intracoastal and into the mangroves on their Intro to Kayaking, 9 to 10:30am, $20 if you live here and $25 if you don't, ages 7 and up. Sunday morning at the same time there's the Family Fun Snorkel, $15 and $19, ages 10 and up, and you'll want to bring your own mask and water shoes. Then Sunday afternoon they're doing the Back to School Shell-ebration, 2 to 3:30pm, $8 and $10, where kids turn shells and beach finds into a backpack charm.

Three completely different weekends depending on who you bring. All three need advance registration through the city and they do fill, so book before you build a Saturday around it.

Source: City of Boca Raton

Because Boca was apparently one restaurant short of covering every continent, Nômade opened at the end of May on SW 18th Street and decided not to choose. The menu pulls from North Africa, the Mediterranean, Latin America and Europe in the same sitting 🌍, so lamb lollipops and lomo saltado and chicken schnitzel all end up on one table and somehow none of it argues.

Co owner Mary C. Webster built the room out of her own travels, down to the handmade Moroccan glassware and the tile at the bar. Whatever lands in front of you is getting photographed before anyone picks up a fork.

6030 SW 18th Street.

Source: Reservations

Everyone assumed padel would turn up here behind a gate, the way new racquet sports usually do in this town. It did the opposite. Padel X put eight indoor courts under thirty foot ceilings in a converted warehouse on Holland Drive, and anybody can book one 🎾. A court runs $100 an hour, flat, with no peak pricing, which comes out to $25 a head once you've rounded up three other people. Clinics and open play are $45.

Meanwhile Boca West, Broken Sound, Woodfield, St Andrews and the Polo Club all put their money into pickleball instead. Boca Grove is the one club in town that got to padel first.

If you'd rather try it than commit to it, they're running JETSET On The Mat x Padel X tomorrow, 9am to noon, which is a Pilates class, padel clinics, open play, cold plunge, sauna and compression boots. Fifteen dollars for three hours, which is roughly what a smoothie costs.

1081 Holland Drive, Suite 3.

Source: Padel X

This is the one genuine advantage of living here 👙. Everywhere else in the country this is the sad end of season rack nobody wants to look at. In Boca it's a 70% off buy on something you'll wear in eleven weeks and again in March.

Aerie is running 60 to 70% off clearance with bikini tops and bottoms at $15, and the swimwear clearance goes deeper than that, with bottoms from $8.08 and one pieces from $16.48. OFFLINE leggings are 40% off and bras are 25 to 50%.

Clearance runs through the 21st and everything else ends on the 17th.

You'll find them at Town Center, Suite 1044a, Main Level, opposite Williams Sonoma by Saks, and OFFLINE has its own storefront at Suite 1128a. Both are open 10 to 9 Friday and Saturday and 11 to 7 Sunday.

Source: Aerie

We're in the busy half of hurricane season, and this is the part where the out of state crews turn up in Boca, work the storm and disappear again ⚡. Rack Electric has been at 153 NW 16th Street since 1994, so they're still here in November when you have a question.

John Rack was a New York City firefighter until an injury ended that, so he became a master electrician and started over down here. His son Jesse runs it now. They're at 4.8 stars across more than 3,300 reviews, they do 24/7 emergency service, and their Florida license, EC13002600, is one you can look up yourself in about ten seconds.

Worth sorting out in the second week of September rather than the afternoon the power goes.

Source: Rack Electric

Three Boca places with the letters shaken up 🧩. Answers are at the very bottom, and we're trusting you not to scroll.

Solve it, then send it to one person who lives here and your name goes in for the tote. We draw a name every month.

Want Boca to know your name?

Good in Boca lands in local inboxes five mornings a week. We work with a limited number of local businesses that want to be part of what people here are reading, doing, eating and talking about.

If Boca is your customer, you should probably be here.

Twenty five years on, and Boca's version of remembering it is a few hundred people climbing a stadium before the heat sets in. Go do something outside this weekend. The water is still warm and it is about to be everyone else's off season.

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The Good in Boca Team

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Friday Three answers: Mizner Park, Gumbo Limbo, Red Reef.