Coral Springs, FL

Sample Road and University Drive now form Coral Springs' closest equivalent to a downtown. City Hall and the Center for the Arts occupy or adjoin the crossroads, and the two Cornerstone towers add apartments, shops, restaurants, and offices on its southwest corner. Both towers were complete by mid-2026, but the district was still opening in stages. Three ground-floor businesses were already operating that July, with additional openings expected later in the year. The Coral Springs Museum of Art was also preparing to move from the arts center into Cornerstone in fall 2026. This is a new concentration of public and commercial activity inside a largely built-out city whose original plan spread destinations along broad roads. That original plan began on green-bean fields and cattle land.

ATTRLegionarius / CC BY 2.5

James Hunt and Joe Taravella led Coral Ridge Properties in acquiring an initial 3,860 acres and laying out subdivisions, canals, large residential lots, major roads, and detailed architectural controls. Coral Springs incorporated on July 10, 1963, before most construction was complete. Its first structure was a forty-foot covered bridge erected at the sales entrance in 1964. The bridge remains the only covered bridge in a public right-of-way in Florida and is recognized as a state heritage site. At Mullins Park, the Museum of History occupies the developer's thirty-by-twenty-foot sales office, which opened in 1964, moved to the park in 1977, and became a museum the following year. Both small buildings began as tools for selling an unfinished city.

ATTRJedi94 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Working life is divided among the new center, major corridors, and a highway-side business district. The 442-acre Coral Springs Commerce Park near the Sawgrass Expressway contains corporate offices, manufacturers, distribution operations, and service firms. Broward County Public Schools, Broward Health, payment-technology company Fiserv, and optical distributor ABB Optical illustrate the city's education, medical, financial-technology, and logistics work. Shops, restaurants, professional offices, and services line University Drive and Sample Road and cluster around Coral Square. These locations rarely read as one employment center: larger workplaces use Commerce Park, city and cultural employees work near the downtown crossroads, and corridor businesses sit closer to the residential subdivisions between them. Public facilities follow the same dispersed map. The Sportsplex on the western edge groups athletic fields with the Aquatic Complex, Tennis Center, Sawgrass Nature Center, and Panthers IceDen.

ATTRLegionarius at English Wikipedia / CC BY 2.5

Mullins Park, the Center for the Arts, and the new Cornerstone district occupy separate central sites, while neighborhood parks and commercial corridors extend across roughly twenty-four square miles. The city's free Blue and Green community shuttles connect civic, shopping, medical, and recreation stops, giving residents an alternative to driving some of those routes. The scheduled museum move would place contemporary art at the newest downtown project; the older Museum of History remains in the tiny sales office at Mullins Park. Between them, the covered bridge still stands where prospective buyers first entered a community of canals, planned roads, and mostly unbuilt lots.