For as long as most residents can remember, the southwest corner of University Drive and Sample Road held a low, sun-bleached office plaza that nobody visited for any reason beyond an appointment. The Coral Springs Financial Plaza went up in 1974, aged the way stucco strip centers age in South Florida, and sat there while the rest of the city grew up around it. If you've lived here fifteen years or fifty, you've driven past that corner a thousand times without ever once considering it a destination.
That's the point worth sitting with, because it's not really a story about a construction project. Coral Springs was platted in 1963 as a planned suburb built for cars and cul-de-sacs, wide arterials and strip malls, never a walkable center. What's rising at that corner right now is the first attempt this city has ever made to build one, and the clearest sign it's not just another round of renderings is where the public money is going.
A City Built Without a Center
Coral Springs incorporated with a specific vision in mind: quiet single-family neighborhoods, efficient roads, plenty of parking. It worked, and the city grew past 130,000 residents on that formula. But it also meant that unlike Delray Beach or Fort Lauderdale, Coral Springs never had an Atlantic Avenue or a Riverwalk, no single place residents point to when someone asks where the city actually gathers.
The city recognized the gap two decades ago. Coral Springs established its Community Redevelopment Agency in 2002 specifically to guide downtown redevelopment, and for most of the years since, that guidance stayed on paper. Plans changed, zoning fights delayed groundbreaking, and a 2020 demolition timeline for the old Financial Plaza came and went more than once before the building actually came down.
The Corner That Finally Moved
What's different now is that the corner has actually changed hands, physically. The roughly seven-acre site is being redeveloped as Cornerstone, a mixed-use district that city planners have designated the anchor of a broader 136-acre downtown zone. The residential half of the project went to Mill Creek Residential, which is building it under the Modera Coral Springs name in two phases.
Modera's South Block, an eight-story building at 3210 N. University Drive, brought 351 apartments and 14,600 square feet of ground-floor retail online first. The North Block followed with 353 more units and 32,280 square feet of retail space, with preleasing that began in October 2025 and first move-ins expected in late 2025 or early 2026. One of the confirmed North Block retail tenants is Paris Baguette, giving the district its first true daytime anchor beyond apartment lobbies.
Here's a rough sense of how long this took to become real:
| Milestone | What Happened |
|---|---|
| 2002 | Coral Springs CRA formed to guide downtown redevelopment |
| 2020 | City announces a demolition timeline for the Financial Plaza |
| Since then | Financial Plaza demolished; Modera Phase I built and leased |
| Oct 2025 | Modera Phase II preleasing begins |
| 2026 | Restaurant tenants sign, Museum of Art construction completes |
Two decades between the first plan and the first residents moving in is a long runway, and it's worth acknowledging that if you've heard "downtown Coral Springs" promised before and shrugged, you're not wrong to have been skeptical. What's different this cycle is that the buildings are occupied, not rendered.
What's Actually Open Right Now
The retail lineup filling in around Cornerstone tells you this isn't a single plaza opening in isolation. It's a corridor. Mitch's Downtown Bagel Cafe reopened inside Cornerstone at 3334 N. University Drive this spring, serving the same New York-style bagels and matzo ball soup the original location built its name on. A few blocks north, Harmony Indian Cuisine opened in the Maplewood Plaza near Coral Square Mall after roughly a year of planning, and Flora's Italian Eatery, run by the family behind Flora Fine Foods, opened across from the Florida Panthers IceDen with an Eataly-style mix of food stations and a market.
Big Whiskey's American Restaurant and Bar, the Missouri chain known for a menu of more than 120 whiskeys, confirmed a Cornerstone location earlier this year as its second Florida spot, run locally by Coral Springs-based operator Steven Swanson. A short drive over at Sawgrass Center, Ember & Vine opened August 3 with an all-day Napa-inspired menu and coffee sourced from 360F Roasters, a roastery based right here in Coral Springs. Pilar Coffee Bar is planning a Cornerstone location of its own, and a still-unnamed Argentinian steakhouse has a "coming soon" sign up at the former Smith & Webster space, a sign that upscale dining keeps testing this market and finding takers.
None of this reads like a single developer's marketing push. It reads like a corridor that decided, more or less at once, that this stretch of University Drive was worth investing in.
The Museum Is the Tell
Private restaurant leases are one kind of signal. A city moving its museum is a different one, because it means public money is on the line, not just a landlord betting on rent.
The Coral Springs Museum of Art is relocating into an 8,100-square-foot gallery space inside Cornerstone, funded by roughly $2 million from the city's capital budget, $1 million from the Community Redevelopment Agency, and about $500,000 in landlord and tenant allowances, for a total project cost of $3.4 million. As of construction updates in June 2026, interior concrete work, electrical and fire alarm rough-ins, and plumbing inspections were already complete, with a grand opening the city projected for late August or early September, complete with a ribbon-cutting, guided tours, and live music.
Rod Sheldon, the principal developer behind the project, has described Cornerstone in personal terms more than once, pointing back to the very same corner where the site now sits.
"As a young man, I remember applying for a mortgage on my first home at the financial plaza."
That's not a line from a press release written to sound sentimental. It's the kind of detail that only comes from someone who watched the corner sit unchanged for decades and is now the one tearing it down and rebuilding it.
What This Means for the Next Few Weekends
If you live in Coral Springs and haven't paid attention to that corner since the demolition crews finished, here's what's worth actually doing. The museum's grand opening is expected within the next few weeks, and it's shaping up to be the kind of event worth putting on the calendar, given the ribbon-cutting and live music planned. Mitch's is already open for the bagel-and-deli routine most longtime residents already know by heart. If you're catching a movie or picking up groceries at the Sawgrass Center anyway, Ember & Vine is worth a stop for the local roast alone.
The bigger shift is less about any single opening and more about what it means that these openings are clustering in one place instead of scattering across the usual strip malls along University Drive and Sample Road. For a city that spent more than sixty years without a center, that clustering is the story.
Whether Cornerstone ends up being the downtown Coral Springs commissioners have talked about since 2002 or simply a very good mixed-use plaza, the corner has already changed more in the last two years than it did in the decades the old Financial Plaza sat there. That's worth knowing whether you're grabbing a bagel this weekend or just curious what's finally happening at that corner you've been driving past your whole time here.
If Coral Springs' new center ever has you thinking about what a move within South Florida might look like, from a first home to a scaled-up one, the team at The Taylor Kane Group knows this market corner by corner. Reach out anytime to schedule a consultation.
