Old City Hall to be torn down
City envisions the land as part of a new downtown
Coral Springs needs the land for development, officials say. The new City Hall opened on Sample Road this year.
Coral Springs’ old City Hall, the brick building where the city’s first residents rode up on horseback to retrieve their mail, will be demolished in June.
The city’s plan: raze it and sell a clean piece of land to a developer as part of a new downtown vision.
“I’m going to hate to see that building go [because of the] historical value,” said Commissioner Larry Vignola. But “we need that area for development. That building served us well. It was only supposed to be a temporary real estate office. The city outgrew that in the late ’70s and, unfortunately, it’s time for it to go.”
The new City Hall opened across the street on Sample Road earlier this year.
Coral Springs Deputy City Manager Cynthia Birdsill said the city will spend $162,000 to raze the building on June 21.
“The vision for the property would be to be developed for mixeduse that contributes to the vibrancy and attraction to our downtown,” she said.
Among the possibilities: anything. “Residential, commercial, office, retail/restaurant — generally,” she said.
It’s part of an ongoing redevelopment effort at the intersection of University Drive and Sample Road, which city officials want to become a downtown area.
The northeastern quadrant, once the site of a Publix supermarket, is still empty, but city officials hope development will eventually happen there. The southeastern corner has offices, as well as the Northwest Regional Library and the Coral Springs Charter School. City officials are trying to find a new location for the school, so they can use the land for something else.
They’re also in talks with the landowners of the shopping plaza east of the old City Hall building, at the northwestern corner bordering University Drive. The hope is to sell that land and create one larger parcel to attract a developer.
“We are still meeting with landowners to try to position the corner for a land assemblage for a larger project,” Birdsill said. “We would hope to be able to connect this with the old City Hall site ideally.”
The land at the southwestern corner, near the new City Hall, would become the site of a developer’s plan to build a hotel with a maximum of eight stories, a grocery store, restaurants, plus retail space, a residential tower of 450 rental apartments and parking garages. The 10-story office building there now, Coral Springs Financial Plaza, will be razed early next year, Birdsill said.
The old City Hall is a colonialstyle building that served many uses over the decades.
James Hunt, president of Coral Ridge Properties, which built Coral