A Mall to Call Home : An Urban Amenity on the Outskirts

They moved from The Valley to this valley in 1984, before procreation changed the family portrait. Sandy and Elaine Senen had been renting in Sherman Oaks when housing prices beckoned them up Interstate 5 to the new tracts of the Santa Clarita Valley. They became homeowners, but the trade-off was Sandy’s 50-minute commute to work in the Mid-Wilshire district.

“This was all onion fields,” he recalled on a recent visit with Elaine and their two children to Valencia Town Center, Southern California’s newest shopping mall. “I used to come home and smell the onions growing. And there was no traffic.”

His tone was wistful. So do the Senens yearn for pastoral yesterdays? Does the new mall represent something gained--but also something lost?

Not at all, they say. Valencia Town Center, the Senens say, has enhanced the orderly charms of this great-place-to-raise-the-kids community on Los Angeles County’s northern fringe. Others may miss the farmland, Sandy Senen says, but now that the mall is here--finally--it sure beats schlepping out to Northridge Fashion Center on weekends.

In a nation where suburbanites increasingly regard the local shopping plaza as a kind of birthright, Santa Clarita has finally arrived. It’s a nice mall, too--clean, well-lighted, no smoking allowed--and it has a nice old-fashioned merry-go-round, all of which scores points in a community that prides itself on niceness. The best thing about Valencia Town Center, its devotees say, is the simple fact that it exists. “ Our mall,” shoppers sometimes say, not “the mall.”

Even some Santa Claritans who are not so enamored of this shopping center, such as growth-control-minded Mayor Jan Heidt, acknowledge its popularity.

“I didn’t care one way or the other if a mall came here,” Heidt explained. “All I know is I lived here 20 years and people wanted it. For myself, I’d be happy if nothing else was ever built here. But that’s really unrealistic.”

The affection is all the more remarkable because the mall is emblematic of the relentless push and pull of the big city to the south. As more and more people flee Los Angeles for this semi-isolated, semi-rustic valley, the more that Santa Clarita resembles part of the great megalopolis beyond the ridge. As Mayor Heidt warily notes, a county regional planning study projects that the valley’s population--now about 150,000 inside and outside of city limits--will grow to 270,000 within 20 years. How green will their valley be then?

The dread inspired by Los Angeles has long driven the political life here. In the 1970s, secession-minded activists failed to carve “Canyon County” out of this region. A milder rebellion succeeded in 1987 when residents angry over county governance won approval to create the city of Santa Clarita, uniting the towns of Newhall, Saugus, Valencia and Canyon Country within its sprawling 45 square miles.

The defeat of a slow-growth measure here in a ballot last year showed that “the issue isn’t so much the rate of growth as the quality of growth,” said Marlee Lauffer, a spokeswoman for the Newhall Land and Farming Co., the company responsible for the master-planned community of Valencia.

Newhall Land, which owns 40,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, began to lay out and build this paint-by-numbers town in 1965. Almost from the start, people who bought into the Spanish- or Cape Cod-style tracts were told that a shopping mall would be built within five years at the intersection of Valencia Boulevard and McBean Parkway. Valencia Town Center, it seems, was part of a five-year plan for about 25 years.

The delay, Lauffer said, reflects the fact that the company initially overestimated the appeal of Santa Clarita to home buyers while affordable housing was still plentiful in the San Fernando Valley. It was not until a surge of development hit Santa Clarita in the 1980s that May Co. (now Robinsons May), J. C. Penney and Sears signed on as anchor stores to make the mall viable.

Many Santa Claritans remain disappointed that the mall isn’t as upscale as they had hoped. A survey last year showed that many residents considered bringing a Nordstrom to the mall one of the community’s top priorities, up there with a desire to ease traffic congestion.

Shopper Jill McFarlin, visiting with her husband and children one recent Sunday, offered this damning judgment: “Well, they don’t have a store than carries Clinique.” Another shopper--Susan Kodel, watching over 4-year-old Alan at the Tilt Family Circus Arcade--offered a more forgiving perspective. Before the mall opened, she noted, “the big deal out here was Target and Mervyn’s.”

If some folks see Valencia Town Center as essentially a place to shop, the lords of Newhall Land portray it as much more--a bold first step in building a new downtown to serve this new city.

In the developer’s grand scheme, Valencia Town Center will expand to add two more department stores and dozens of smaller shops. Moreover, it is envisioned that an outdoor promenade of shops will lead from the mall’s outdoor carousel area--”Town Square,” mall management calls it--to multistory development that will combine office space and residential living. Thus will this suburb spawn a city.

But if the city builders see Santa Clarita as somewhat incomplete, many people point out there is plenty here that could get screwed up.

City officials and residents alike delight in ticking off the city’s virtues: Last October, an FBI survey showed that, among cities with more than 100,000 population, Santa Clarita ranked fourth in fewest reported crimes during the first six months of 1991. The schools have a good reputation and, just recently, authors of a book titled “50 Fabulous Places to Raise Your Family” selected “gorgeous, master-planned” Valencia as one of three California communities in its listing. Endorsements from residents are easy to come by.

Another laurel recently came from City and State magazine, which ranked Santa Clarita No. 5 among the nation’s “up and coming” cities. Exactly what this means, however, is unclear; Los Angeles, for all its troubles, was ranked No. 6 and Las Vegas was No. 1.

The desire to expand Santa Clarita while preserving its hometown virtues is one reason why the local historical society and other residents were recruited to join in the mall’s design process, say Lauffer and Kristin Mueller, the mall’s general manager.

That is why Santa Clarita’s history is depicted in the murals that grace the food court. The merry-go-round’s design was inspired by the old Clyde Beatty Circus, which wintered here. And set into the pavement around the carousel are tiles designed by local elementary school classes--another effort to “connect” the community to the mall, Mueller explained.

While many shopping centers become notorious hangouts for teen-age “mall rats,” Valencia Town Center is known more for the prevalence of young families--parents with baby strollers, toddlers and preteens.

At the mall’s opening last September, Lt. Marvin Dixon of the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station recalled, “It looked like the lineup for Indy. It was incredible. There must have been 800 strollers on opening day.”

Meanwhile, the mall’s “public safety officers”--they don’t call them security guards--have worked to minimize misbehavior by juveniles. The worst offenders, Mueller says, have been photographed and banned for various periods of time; to violate the ban would be to risk a trespassing arrest. As it turns out, Lt. Dixon says, the mall’s safety record is far better than the Sheriff’s Department had anticipated.

All of which adds to the rosy outlook of Jackie Gonzales, proprietor of the Quilted Heart, a local folk-art store that moved to the mall to “be where the action is.” To her, Santa Clarita seems to have achieved a nifty balance.

“The nice thing, I think, about the whole area is that it still has a small-town atmosphere--the mall included,” Gonzales says.

Terri Robbins, the proprietor of Terri’s Chocolate Chippery, qualifies such sentiments.

Business, she explains, has never been sweeter. The wife of and FBI agent and a Santa Clarita resident for 17 years, Robbins says she followed the example of Mrs. Fields seven years ago mostly to get her mind off the dangers of her husband’s work. Now that she’s in a mall, she says, “I make as much money in an hour as used to make in an entire day.”

But when Robbins looks 20 years to the future, her first thought isn’t of 270,000 potential customers in her valley.

Truth is, Terri Robbins says, she wouldn’t mind turning back the valley’s clock a decade.

“I miss it. It was smaller. Quieter. The roads weren’t so congested,” she explained. “There’s just a whole lot of people out here now.”