Unlike the Four Corners out West — the meeting point for Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico — Central Florida’s area with the same name is a tad more complicated.
And somewhat less captivating.
Unlike the Western hot spot, Central Florida’s Four Corners doesn’t offer visitors an opportunity to stick each limb in a different part of the quadrangle. There’s no monument marking the center of the spot and no gift shop selling “I was here” postcards. Pull out a map and you’ll be even more confused, because you won’t find it at all.
No one really can identify the exact boundaries — certainly not in terms of longitude and latitude. But generally speaking, the heart of Four Corners lies at the intersection of two U.S. highways: 192 and 27. From there, it fans out into each of the four counties — Polk, Lake, Orange and Osceola.
What it really means: growth, and lots of it.
On a menu, Four Corners is a pita-pocket sandwich filled with hotels, tourist businesses and new homes. Calling it Four Corners is a nifty way for real-estate agents and others to provide a sense of place for a sea of subdivisions that has different area codes, governments and ZIP codes.
There is little consensus on where Four Corners ends, so each county government has treated its piece of the Four Corners pie as it would any other isolated region. Census estimates indicate that south Lake and northeast Polk cities have added thousands of residents in the past few years.
Local governments face the enormous task of providing the services needed to meet this population boom from new roads and water supplies to parks and fire stations.
