to create a city that is direct and simple ... To leave out all that is ugly, to eliminate the unnecessary, and to give Florida and the nation a resort city as perfect as study and ideals can make it. On the first day of selling lots, May 14, 1925, $2 million was sold, with a further $2 million within the first month. There was a traffic jam in front of his Miami office. Mizner ran buses to Boca from Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and also used seaplanes to transport potential buyers to the site. According to a typically exaggerated sales brochure, he had offices in "several cities in Florida", as well as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Savannah, Georgia. (The only sales offices were in Palm Beach, Miami, and his Administration Buildings in the future Boca Raton.) By the end of October over $25 million in lots had been sold (though in most cases not paid for). Seeing that the large hotel would take a long time to build, Mizner immediately began work on a 100-room smaller hotel, the Ritz-Carlton Cloister Inn (now a wing of the Boca Raton Resort & Club). It was constructed in late 1925 and opened in early 1926, at a cost of $1,750,000. Mizner's role in the land boom collapse of 1926 Where Mizner was not strong was in planning. He built houses "off the cuff", without plans. He also had no financial plan, and tried to handle finance off the cuff as well. But the facilities he had announced — three golf courses, a polo ground, a theater, a large church, and an airport, to start with – were going to require a lot of money to build. Mizner did not have it, and he did not have a plan for getting it, or as a writer put it, his "extravagant imagination outstripped his budget and the market." He lacked "financial sense and business shrewdness." What he had were a lot of high society contacts, fame, and a track record building houses for the wealthy in Palm Beach. When he set up Mizner Development Corporation in 1925, he was able to assemble a fantastic board of famous people and investors. This was a prime reason why initial sales were spectacular. Marie Dressler, recruited as a salesperson, described selling Boca Raton lots as "a creative endeavor" and the activity there