Plans Call for Irvine’s First Real City Hall, But No ‘Downtown’
Westpark, the eighth residential village to be created by the Irvine Co. over the past two decades in the town that bears its name, will not be like any other.
The 800-acre, 5,000-unit development now taking shape north of the San Diego Freeway and west of Culver Drive will be the home of a civic center and the first permanent city hall for the town of 85,000 residents.
In the next two years, construction of the $26-million civic center, along with an $80-million hospital, will provide two of the traditional elements of municipal identity for a city with a population projected to reach 300,000, planners say.
‘Totally Planned Community’
But for a city advertised as a “totally planned community,” Irvine is without a center. Unlike most upscale Southern California cities, it has neither a downtown nor a major mall it can call its own. And construction of a city hall, concluding a 20-year odyssey during which four separate locations were proposed and discarded, does not signal a change, Irvine Co. officials say.
“I don’t think there will be such a thing as a downtown in the way people traditionally see a downtown,” said Roger Seitz, the Irvine Co.’s vice president for urban planning and design, “because that’s not congruent with the life style people have chosen down here.
“I think there are going to be a number of sub-centers” of Irvine, Seitz said, including Westpark, described in a brochure as a “gateway” to the city; University Town Center near the UC Irvine campus; the Irvine Spectrum (the area known as the Golden Triangle, around the intersection of Interstates 5 and 405); the Irvine Business Complex (between Von Karman Avenue and Jamboree Boulevard), and the master plan’s decentralized “activity corridor” running through the Village of Woodbridge (between Barranca and Alton parkways).
According to the vision of the late William Pereira, the city’s master planner, Irvine would radiate out from a geographic focus adjacent to the UCI campus, which would include a city hall and a nearby campus hospital.
Pereira called it University Town Center in his original plan. The Irvine Co. planned to build its corporate headquarters there.
Twenty-five years later, there have been more than 40 revisions in the plan, according to Mayor David Baker. Town Center, while in the midst of a mild renaissance, is home to none of the traditional institutions that Pereira planned.
“It hasn’t happened as people drew it,” Seitz said, “but it rarely does.”
Sold as Campus Community
In the beginning, the Irvine Co. was telling prospective home buyers that the initial developments clustered near UCI would offer the feel of a campus community--with University Town Center, across Campus Drive, at its core--but without the crowding and high rents of the Westside of Los Angeles.
But in 1969 the UCI campus, like many across the country, erupted with student protests, controversial speakers and the burning of a Bank of America trailer. Both the company and the young community recoiled.
Over the next few years the company and the city downplayed their identification with the university. The Irvine Co. decided to build its headquarters at Newport Center and ultimately abandoned its support for a campus hospital. Commercial development of Town Center went onto the shelf, and the search for a new site for the city hall was on:
- In 1972, the City Council, meeting in its temporary quarters in Town Center, adopted a general plan calling for construction of a permanent city hall just north of the 405, at the intersection of Jeffrey Road and Barranca Parkway, near the geographic center of Irvine. The site was adjacent to the site of a proposed residential development, Village 12 on the master plan.
- In 1976, construction began on a $1.2-million “interim” civic center farther north, at the intersection of Jamboree Boulevard and McGaw Avenue, in an area dominated by corporate headquarters and some light industrial facilities.
- In 1981, support revived for an expanded civic center at Jeffrey and Barranca, clustered around what was then called the north campus of Saddleback Community College. This complex would have included the city hall, the hospital and school and water district headquarters. That plan fell victim to the ongoing hospital dispute.
- In 1984, the Irvine Co. proposed building the new city hall in the Quail Hill area. Construction of a major governmental complex would have meant building roads and utility lines to a previously isolated area. City employees wanting to live close to their jobs would provide a built-in market for apartments, condominiums, homes and town houses.
Despite a 4-1 City Council majority in support of the site, it was withdrawn by the Irvine Co. in the face of opposition from environmentalists and others.
- Finally in 1984, several months after discarding the Quail Hill site, the City Council settled on the Westpark site, where a new residential village was planned, for its governmental complex. “It really came down to where we could find a large enough site,” Seitz of the Irvine Co. said.
The choice caused almost no controversy, said Larry Agran, a council member and former mayor, and a frequent adversary of the Irvine Co. For years it “was about second on everyone’s list” of sites for the complex, Agran said. “The fact that the city hall is going to be separate from university, commercial and industrial areas suggests that multiple nodes of activity are the way to go,” Agran said. “I don’t think that’s a mistake, necessarily.”
The original city hall site, Town Center, is still assigned a priority for commercial development, and is one of the “sub-centers” that the Irvine Co.’s Seitz envisions. Signs of increased activity on the Town Center side of the UCI campus suggest that the area may become such a focus.
Construction will begin soon on the UCI campus for the $3.8-million, 5,000-seat Donald L. Bren Events Center, about half the cost of which was provided by Bren, the Irvine Co. and Nielsen. The arena will be the site of athletic contests and large entertainment events.
Last year, the Irvine City Council voted to build a 750-seat municipal theater for the performing arts on the campus, to be operated jointly by the city and the university when completed in late 1988. Land for the site, valued at $3 million, was donated by the university, and $9.5 million for construction was included in a $90.4-million municipal bond issue that funded the civic center. The Irvine Co. committed $100,000 to the theater’s initial annual budget.
Another “sub-center” cited by Seitz is the Von Karman-Jamboree corridor, which the City Council recently cleared for increased commercial development.
Mayor Baker said the area “has the potential to become our present downtown.” Coupled with commercial development of the adjoining Fluor Corp. property on I-405, it could be “downtown for the next 10 years,” he said.
“The downtown of the future,” Baker said, may be farther south, in the “Irvine Center” area bordering the Irvine Spectrum development at the Laguna Freeway. That area, he said, “will someday be a dynamic financial center.” This is also the site for the AMI/Irvine Medical Center hospital, plans for which were unveiled Feb. 13.
That area, the so-called Golden Triangle, will include high-technology parks for biomedical and electronics companies, a light manufacturing industrial park, and space for corporate headquarters, shops, restaurants and hotels.
City hall will not be the only distinguishing feature of Westpark. The civic center will include a day-care facility for 100 children, as well as the city’s new community park, both of which are being used as selling points by the company.
Priced $80,000-$170,000
According to an Irvine Co. brochure, the 5,000 units will include “single-family detached, attached and semi-attached homes, town homes, apartments and a senior citizen complex,” in the $80,000-$170,000 price range.
Combined with city-mandated, subsidized rental units, some for under $500 a month, Westpark will represent, Seitz said, “a continuum from high end to more affordable,” at least by Irvine standards. “Westpark recognizes the need to have a substantially balanced housing stock,” he said.
Over the years, the Irvine villages have been criticized for being antiseptic and bland, criticisms that Seitz said have been taken into account.
Unlike some of the other villages, Westpark will have “a much stronger architectural expression,” he said, strongly Southern California, with lots of stucco walls and tile roofs. “You’ll sure know when you’re here,” he said, reflecting the imprint of company owner Donald Bren.
Telephone and utility lines will be underground, and there will be parks, paseos, bike paths, greenbelts and setbacks that characterize the earlier Irvine villages. But, Seitz said, the landscaping will be more modest and, in general, planning has been more cost-conscious.
“Before,” said Seitz, who has been on the job for 18 months, Irvine Co. designers “were really selling a dream, and to a large degree they succeeded.” However, he added, the time has passed when village planners designing common areas “could do anything and be rescued by inflation.”
“It seems like the better job we did,” said former Irvine Co. President Raymond Watson of the company’s early residential developments, “the more expensive it became and the less people could enjoy it.”
