Two acres of dirt on the barrier island, 291 feet of Intracoastal frontage, and an asking price that runs up to $45 million. The people selling it call it the Boca Trophy lot, which tells you who it is for and nothing you had not already guessed.

The planning board has now handed it the only thing it was missing. A dock running 196 feet into the Intracoastal. The city's limit is 60. One shared pier for two houses that do not exist yet, four slips on it, two of them sized for 80-foot boats.

Now the part that will irritate you and then un-irritate you. The argument that won was the environmental one. The water there is 771 feet across and shallow enough that a code-length dock would have meant dredging a stretch of bottom nobody has ever touched, so going long is the version that leaves it alone. The state had already permitted it. Staff recommended it. The vote was 7 to nothing. That is what happens when the green argument and the expensive argument land on the same side of the table.

When a pier turns up where those palm trees are now, you will know which meeting it came out of.

Source: Boca Daily News

North Park is getting a padel club with $35 resident day passes, FAU has been running a free concert outside the stadium without telling anybody, and a high school courtyard needs 624 plants in the ground by Saturday.

Let's get into it.

Boca Paddle is going in at 50 West Jeffery Street, the Boca Teeca end of North Park, and it is a private club sitting on public park land. Indoor, covered and open air courts for pickleball and padel, plus a dedicated stadium court.

Day passes are $35 if you can prove you live in Boca and $40 if you cannot. Memberships are on sale now and the club says only a limited number go out this year. Read that part closely, because the membership is the door and nothing else. Court rentals, open play, clinics and leagues all get billed separately.

Same park as the skate park, which means North Park is quietly turning into the busiest piece of land in the city.

Source: Boca Post

The Owls started a pregame concert series in the Publix Paradise Plaza next to Flagler Credit Union Stadium. The plaza opens at 5pm, the music runs for the 90 minutes before kickoff, and the concert is free. Food trucks sit outside the gates, and there is a kids zone, giveaways and the mascots doing photos.

It launched September 12 with a Zac Brown tribute band in front of the Navy game. Next home game is Friday, September 19 against FIU, and FAU has not posted who is playing yet. Everything shuts down 30 minutes before kickoff.

Source: Boca Post

Home Depot donated 624 plants, blue rubber mulch and umbrellas to rebuild the courtyard at West Boca Raton Community High School, 12811 Glades Road, and sent ten of its own people along with them. CPM Landscaping is donating the prep and digging the holes.

Crews start around 6am on Saturday, September 19, and community volunteers are asked to turn up at 8am. The PTSA says it is open to everyone, not only families at the school, and there is a SignupGenius form on the listing.

Source: Boca Post

The city spent years arguing about what to do with the Wildflower parcel. What it does with it now is run free fitness classes on it, on the Intracoastal, and then barely tell anybody.

Bootcamp's Wednesday, 10 to 11. Free, drop in, no registration, bring a water bottle. The same series runs pilates Saturdays at 9 and yoga Sundays at 9, also free, also drop in. Bring your own mat for those two.

Wildflower Park, 551 East Palmetto Park Road. Park's open 7am to 11pm.

The only thing standing between you and a free trainer on the water is getting up.

Source: City of Boca Raton and Wildflower in Bloom

There's a real black box theater at 8221 Glades Road, tucked into Piccadilly Square, and half the people who've parked forty feet from its door have no idea it's there. Boca Black Box runs about 200 seats, which means there's no bad one and nowhere to hide either. Tribute concerts, live music, comedy.

Next up is An Enchanted Evening with Barbra, starring Sharon Owens, Friday September 19 at 7pm. Two hundred seats goes fast, so call rather than turn up. Box office is 561.483.9036 and the plaza parking is free.

Other towns hide a speakeasy. We hid a whole theater.

Source: Boca Black Box and BocaRaton.com

Taki Omakase put a Tokyo style counter at 1658 North Federal Highway and then did the least Boca thing available to it. It made the room small and the rules firm. Eighteen courses, fish out of Toyosu Market in Japan, and curing methods the counter traces back to pre Edo Tokyo.

Dinner's every night, six to ten. Lunch is Friday and Saturday, 12:30 to 1:30, and that's the whole window. Not a lunch service. A lunch hour.

Winston's the chef behind the Boca counter. Book it on OpenTable, because eighteen courses isn't a walk-in.

1658 North Federal Highway. 561.213.2351.

Turn up at 1:35 and you've missed it by a week.

Source: Taki Omakase

Boca Cryo is at 190 Glades Road and the centerpiece is a chamber that drops to minus 110 Celsius, minus 166 Fahrenheit, and you stand in it for three minutes. Theirs run on electrically cooled air instead of liquid nitrogen, so nothing's evaporating around your ankles while you count down.

The rest of the floor reads like a triathlete's shopping list that got out of hand: infrared sauna, red light, compression boots, PEMF, EWOT, EMSculpt, IV drips. Boca didn't invent paying to be uncomfortable, but we've taken to it with real commitment.

190 Glades Road, Suite C. 561.717.4402.

The cold is the headline. The boots are what you'll text somebody about.

Source: Boca Cryo

VÊTU is family run, sits in Royal Palm Place, and has the one thing that separates a boutique from a rack of clothes: a seamstress and a tailor working on site. You find the dress, you try the dress, the hem gets handled before you leave. No second trip. No bag riding around in your trunk until December.

The floor is Boca in its natural habitat: swim, cover ups, linen, straw bags, hats, a jewelry case by the register. The name's French for dressed, which for a shop that also does the fitting is a better joke than they were going for.

Royal Palm Place, 306 South Federal Highway.

Wedding, cruise, or Tuesday. Same trip.

Source: Boca Raton Magazine and Royal Palm Place

September's the loud half of hurricane season, and the good news is that the single most useful thing you can do about it takes one phone call and happens while you're at work.

Zimmerman Tree Service works Boca with nationally certified arborists, not a truck and a chainsaw and a guy named Dave. Trimming and pruning to cut wind resistance, hazard removal, health diagnosis for the trees you can't read yourself, and a 24 hour line for the night it goes sideways anyway.

They also do mangrove trimming, which is its own permitted, regulated, do-not-improvise world.

561.968.1045.

Book it this week and the rest of the season is somebody else's problem.

Source: Zimmerman Tree Service

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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.

Somebody on the barrier island is getting a pier longer than most of the houses on your street, and tomorrow morning the city will hand you a free trainer on the water for the price of showing up. Both of those are Boca and neither one cancels the other out.

Wednesday at ten, on the Intracoastal, for nothing. We'll see who actually goes.

Something we missed? Hit reply, we read everything.

The Good in Boca Team

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