Old-Fashioned Concept at Heart of Valencia Project

As a young boy growing up in the Michigan countryside, Thomas L. Lee liked nothing better than traveling to the bustling center of Birmingham, a nearby town.

“It was just a very exciting place for me to go see different people and different kinds of stores,” Lee said, recalling shopping trips with his parents. “I’ve never forgotten it.”

As president of Newhall Land & Farming Co., Lee wants to re-create some of that urban excitement in the most suburban of settings, the master-planned community of Valencia in northern Los Angeles County.

On an empty field next to a regional mall, Newhall Land is building Town Center Drive, a $100-million project that includes shops, offices, a movie theater, a hotel and apartments. The goal of the Valencia-based company is to create a half-mile-long “Main Street” that will serve as the center of a community that has never had one.

Valencia’s Town Center Drive ranks as one of the most ambitious projects of its kind in the nation. New Main streets and town squares have popped up in the suburbs of Miami; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and Los Angeles. In Orange County, the developer of Rancho Santa Margarita has constructed El Paseo, a Main Street that serves as the backbone of a 250-acre “downtown” of apartments, stores and recreational facilities.

The old-fashioned notion of pedestrians shopping outdoors on Main Street is rapidly emerging as one of the hottest retail concepts in the same suburbs where the enclosed mall and the automobile have long ruled. In a few cases, old shopping centers have been demolished in favor of pedestrian-friendly shopping streets and promenades.

“They are a new form of shopping center,” said Alexander Garvin, professor of urban planning at Yale University. “Nostalgically, they are based on old-fashioned streets.”

Developers and retailers have taken note of the commercial success of such projects as Universal City Walk, a mock street that draws throngs of customers with a combination of shops and entertainment. The granddaddy of manufactured Main Street shopping is Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza, a 150-store, Spanish-style shopping district spread over 15 city blocks. The plaza, which is owned and operated by one development company, opened in 1922.

Some urban planners have dismissed Town Center Drive and others like it as simply a contrived Hollywood back lot instead of an example of innovative city design. Despite the inclusion of sidewalks and other pedestrian-friendly features, most of the people who stroll along Town Center Drive will probably have to drive to get there. True town centers are woven seamlessly into surrounding neighborhoods, reducing the need for people to use their autos, said Los Angeles architect and planner Stefanos Polyzoides.

“The plans [for Town Center Drive] looked like this whole thing was an island surrounded by parking lots,” Polyzoides said. “If people have to drive there anyway, have you really changed the [traditional] planning pattern?”

But defenders of the project say it will encourage other developers to create the kind of humane and pedestrian-friendly environments that are missing in many new cities.

“I see [Town Center Drive] as a huge opportunity to conceive a town center from scratch and to execute it with all the advantages that comprehensive planning, marketing and programming allows,” said Richard Peiser, a professor of urban planning at USC. “The question is, can you create the vitality that you find in traditional town centers?”

The age-old concept of a Main Street, which serves as home to a variety of businesses as well as a focus of community activity, is a radical departure for many master-planned and suburban communities. The wide variety found on a single street goes against the separation of uses--residential from commercial, offices from shops, public from private--that have shaped post-war suburban development.

But Newhall Land executives and their planners decided in this case to go against conventional wisdom if Town Center Drive was to become the center of Valencia and the surrounding Santa Clarita Valley. “We just didn’t want a mall surrounded by housing,” Lee said.

The area where Town Center Drive is being built was designated as the commercial and civic hub of Valencia nearly 40 years ago when legendary urban planner Victor Gruen unveiled his drawings, which visualized a core of high-rise towers. Instead of skyscrapers, the core of Valencia today is dominated by the sprawling Valencia Town Center regional shopping mall, six-lane parkways and low-rise office buildings.

“We were trying to multiply the reasons why people come to this part of town,” said James Backer, senior vice president of commercial and industrial marketing at Newhall Land. “We felt that this was going to be a center for the community.”

But that idea was challenged as impractical by commercial real estate brokers--who said they would not be able to attract tenants--and even by many Newhall executives. Most important, department store owners at Valencia Town Center balked at the idea that Town Center Drive would start at the mall’s doorstep and consume valuable parking spaces.

“We had people who questioned the wisdom of doing this,” Lee said. “It took a lot of work on our part to convince them of this new idea.”

But old habits die hard. The projects remain keenly planned, even though Newhall Land officials promise to deliver the spontaneity and eclecticism of a Main Street. The buildings along Town Center Drive, for example, will be of different heights and design--but not too different under design guidelines. A variety of independent and chain stores and restaurants will stand side by side to appeal to a wide variety of tastes. But Newhall Land will decide the ultimate mix.

“You’ve got to be flexible, but you want to have standards,” Baker said.

While the goal of Town Center Drive is to create a center for a community of 150,000 residents, the street itself will remain private property owned by Newhall Land. But Lee said that the company will not be involved in restricting public access.

“We are not interested in being big brother here,” Lee said. “The customers that come there to shop on the street won’t be aware of the [design and operational] controls that are in place.”

The notion of a private company owning and controlling Main Street seems at odds with the image of the street as a communal gathering place. But in master-planned communities, where often a single developer owns most of the land, few companies are willing to risk their profits and massive investment by ceding control and letting a project evolve piecemeal over decades the way most traditional city centers have grown.

Town Center Drive “acknowledges the formulas of real estate development and tries to twist them into new forms,” Los Angeles architect and planner John Kaliski said. “They should be encouraged to do what they are doing.”

The project has so far drawn an impressive and diverse roster of tenants, ranging from a 250-room Hyatt Hotel and conference center, an Imax and 12-screen Edwards Cinema, Spectrum health club and a six-story customer services center for Century City-based Princess Cruises.

The ability to walk to restaurants and shops instead of being located in a remote office park “was one of the great draws of the Valencia Town Center project,” said Denny Fuerst, a Los Angeles-based Princess Cruises vice president in charge of the relocation of 600 employees. “It has the same type of feel that a number of people enjoy here in Century City.”

The construction of Town Center Drive has met with mixed reaction among local residents and workers.

At Mitch’s Java ‘N Jazz, a coffee house located in one of the first buildings to rise on Town Center Drive, car leasing manager Lynn Ruehman said she is a big fan of the project.

“I like the idea of a Main Street,” Ruehman said, as she picked up some iced mocha coffee drinks. “It gives people a place to hang out.”

But sitting outside sipping their drinks, emergency medical technicians Mike McGrady and Robert Inez said emerging Town Center Drive is a symbol of the crowded urban life they want to avoid.