From today’s Sun-Sentinel:
Five Points – one of the nation’s unique intersections If William Turner, the city’s first mayor and son of Broward County’s first sheriff, could only see Five Points now. Sixty years ago, the confluence of roads where Wilton Drive ends at the intersection of Northeast 26th Street and North Dixie Highway was a dusty, largely undeveloped crossing of routes considered so north of Fort Lauderdale it was country. Today, thousands of cars pass through each day on their way to Oakland Park to the north, Fort Lauderdale’s Federal Highway to the east, its Middle River Terrace neighborhood to the south or Wilton Manors and beyond to the west. A variety of large and small businesses that ring the landscape, from the Publix supermarket built in 2001 and Eckerd Pharmacy built in 1997 to a bar, dry cleaner, two restaurants, insurance agency, check-cashing store, pharmacy, funeral home and used car lot. Business owners attribute their successes to the high visibility their companies enjoy in the bustle of Five Points and the resurgence of Wilton Manors and surrounding communities. “We looked around and realized that at all times four of the five lanes are stopped and people are looking around,” said Sheryl Terovotua, co-owner of 5 Points B-B-Q & Grill at 2525 N. Dixie Highway. That dynamic didn’t exist in the mid-1940s when a small dry cleaning business opened at 2600 N. Dixie. Current owner Rick Miller, son of one of the business’s original owners, remembers the A&W Drive-In across the street and a landscape nursery that is now the site of Eckerd’s.