The building where I work is getting repainted. It’s going from a bland blue-gray to an extremely exciting shade I’ve seen described as moccasin.

The real news is in the highlights. Instead of the pink pillars, planter boxes and archways that surround the entrances, we’re getting a greenish-brown that I think is ochre.

This is the color that, when I was a kid, I liked least in the whole Crayola box.

But at least it is not pink.

I know I am supposed to like pink. Pink is the famous signature color of Boca Raton. Our building, a businesslike box along Interstate 95, is only a few yards north of the Boca Raton line. Although officially in Delray Beach, those pink pillars and planters are, in spirit, pure Boca.

I should feel terrible that they’re painting over the pink. Pink is a tie to this area’s history, and there’s little enough history around here to hang onto.

The Boca Raton Resort & Club, which put Boca on the map, is pink, after all. To this day, its pink tower rises over the landscape like a giant pimple.

Nevertheless, I go along with one of my co-workers, who looked at the change of color the other day and said, “Good. That gray and pink was so ’80s.”

To be a building of today, you want to be terra-cotta red, tawny brown, Navajo white, lemon chiffon.

Some guidebooks still refer to Boca as “The Pink City.” But any visitor hoping to see some fantasy out of The Wizard of Oz will be disappointed.

Sure, Mizner Park is pink. Some neighboring strip malls, too. The fancy Publix on Camino Real and Federal Highway and the nearby Fresh Market are pink. St. Paul Lutheran Church is pink.

But Boca’s city hall, police headquarters and public library are in shades of brown. The new art museum is pink, but the adjacent Count de Hoernele Amphitheater is yellow.

The “Pink Plaza,” as Royal Palm Plaza has long been known, lost its pink about three years ago. It turned into a hodgepodge of “Mediterranean” colors.

“Having 12 buildings all the same pink color is, frankly, a little bit dated and boring,” the plaza’s co-owner, Jim Batmasian, told me, blasphemously.

Pink, in fact, has become so endangered in Boca Raton that the plaza is giving pink a partial comeback. Pink is one of four colors in the latest updating of the downtown shopping center.

“I suggested we should bring that history back,” said architect Juan Caycedo.

The makeover, now under way, includes a change of name (it’ll be Royal Palm Place) and a statue of architect Addison Mizner, “in memory of the master,” Caycedo said.

The monument will be pink. Same as Mizner’s masterwork, the Boca Resort & Club.

At the hotel, “it is our understanding” that Mizner intended it to be pink in tribute to Florida sunsets, said spokeswoman Anne Hersley-Hankins.

But historians say bunk.

Donald Curl, the FAU professor who wrote Mizner’s Florida: American Resort Architecture, says Mizner probably painted the hotel beige when he built it in the 1920s. Unfortunately, no one can say for sure: All we have to go on are black-and-white photos.

In years of research, Curl could find nothing that indicated the hotel originally was pink. To the contrary, it seems Mizner disliked the color.

“He was trying to create a very upscale resort,” Curl told me, “and I think you can make the case that pink is not a very upscale color.”

Susan Gillis, archivist at the Boca Raton Historical Society, said it was probably J. Meyer Schine, the resort’s third owner, who painted it pink when he took it over in the 1940s.

“It was the favorite color of his wife, Hildegarde,” Gillis said. Schine also owned hotels in Miami Beach and California. Whether deeply in love or severely henpecked, Schine painted all of them pink.

Mizner, on the other hand, liked pastels, Curl said.

For his part, Curl is OK with a “nice pink pink, like a Brooks Brothers shirt.”

“But,” he lamented, “we’ve always used an ugly pink.”

Here’s to ochre.

Howard Goodman’s column is published Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. He can be reached at or 561-243-6638.