If you had stopped here at night, it was a different story. It was just some asphalt, litter, and the sounds of roaring trucks. A work in progress still, there were no restrooms, no buildings, not even a picnic bench at the 23-acre site. When I-95 was still in development, many stops like this were designed for truck drivers to rest. If you were driving south on I-95 in the Boca Raton area about 40 years ago just before reaching the Broward County line you would have noticed just to the right a small exit. In fact, because cruising was such an issue, it is one of the reasons rest stops do not exist at all along South Florida’s I-95 corridor anymore. It was in the film “There’s Something About Mary,” but was this really a thing? In the 1997 film, Ben Stiller’s character is arrested at a rest stop when he stops to use the restroom but quickly finds himself in the middle of a sting operation targeting gay men cruising at rest stops.Įarlier in the film, his therapist mentions that “rest stops are the bathhouses of the 90s for many many gay men.”įor one Boca Raton area rest stop, it would certainly have seemed so.
