Why Granary Square matters.
Granary Square is an established shopping center where Valencia's master-planned character meets an early neighborhood-commercial model shaped by Newhall Land and Farming Company's transformation of its former ranch holdings.
Set along McBean Parkway near Arroyo Park Drive and just steps from Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, the shopping center occupies Central Valencia between the Old Orchard residential tracts, the landscaped corridor extending toward Valencia Boulevard and the Santa Clara River basin to the south, with the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains enclosing the western valley. Low-rise retail buildings turn inward toward parking and pedestrian approaches, preserving the scale of the neighborhood centers embedded throughout Valencia's original plan. Grocery retail provides the principal commercial anchor, joined by restaurants, personal services and smaller storefronts serving the surrounding residential districts. Valencia's paseo network strengthens the connection with nearby neighborhoods by carrying separated pedestrian and bicycle paths through the planned landscape. The result is a mature neighborhood center whose modest physical scale and integration with surrounding homes preserve an early commercial layer of Valencia's transformation from ranchland into a planned suburban community.
What defines Granary Square.
Granary Square is best known for emerging during the second major decade of Valencia's master-planned development as a neighborhood shopping center created within the former Newhall Ranch. Newhall Land and Farming Company had begun developing Valencia from a master plan adopted in 1965, with the first residents arriving during the following decade and commercial, educational and recreational components expanding alongside the new villages. Granary Square was completed in 1982 on 13.7 acres at McBean Parkway and Arroyo Park Drive, giving the growing residential districts a 120,600-square-foot commercial center. Hughes supermarket anchored the property, and B. Dalton brought the national bookselling chain into its original tenant mix. Newhall Investment Properties held the center after its 1983 separation from Newhall Land and Farming, placing Granary Square within a portfolio assembled for disposition as the parent company continued developing Valencia. A Pacific Telesis pension fund acquired the fully leased property through QRE Holding Company for $15 million in 1986, only four years after completion. The transaction captured an early point at which Valencia's neighborhood retail had matured into institutional real estate, decades before the surrounding community reached its present scale.
The center's 1982 configuration belongs to a distinctive phase of Valencia in which Newhall Land distributed daily commerce among residential villages connected by broad landscaped roads and an extensive pedestrian system. McBean Parkway had already become one of the community's principal organizing corridors, linking housing with the hospital, educational institutions and subsequent commercial development across the valley. Granary Square concentrated supermarket shopping and smaller storefronts within that structure without assuming the regional scale later associated with Valencia Town Center or Valencia Marketplace. The contrast became sharper during the 1990s, when the 1992 opening of Valencia Town Center and construction of the 720,000-square-foot Valencia Marketplace beginning in 1995 shifted major retail development toward much larger properties. Granary Square retained the neighborhood-center scale established in 1982, leaving its physical relationship with nearby residential tracts substantially closer to Valencia's earlier commercial planning. Its survival preserves a recognizable piece of the period when the master-planned community was expanding through incremental villages and supporting centers across land that Newhall Land had controlled since the nineteenth century.
How Granary Square fits.
Granary Square works as the anchor for an outing connecting one of Valencia's earliest planned parks with a dramatic arts institution conceived by Walt Disney and a preserved ranch whose buildings carry the Santa Clarita Valley's Western film history.
Begin at Old Orchard Park, developed in 1968 as part of the original Valencia master plan and now one of Santa Clarita's oldest public parks. Its creation followed the first wave of Valencia homebuilding, giving the new community an early recreational landscape within the residential fabric. Santa Clarita inherited a small park system when the city incorporated in 1987, then expanded that network to dozens of parks and more than 13,000 acres of open space. A major renovation launched in 2024 continued the life of a property dating almost to Valencia's beginning as a residential community. Continue to California Institute of the Arts, born from Walt and Roy Disney's 1961 merger of Chouinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. Construction of the permanent Valencia campus began in 1969 around a five-level, 500,000-square-foot building designed by Ladd & Kelsey, and more than 650 students entered the completed campus in fall 1971. Herbert Blau helped formulate an interdisciplinary educational model influenced by Black Mountain College, and the early faculty included John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Morton Subotnick, Ravi Shankar and Bella Lewitzky. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro founded the Feminist Art Program there in 1971, and the Character Animation Program assembled an inaugural 1975 class that included Tim Burton, Brad Bird, John Lasseter, John Musker and Henry Selick. Conclude at Tesoro Adobe Historic Park, preserving the former ranch of silent-film cowboy Harry Carey Sr. Carey built the adobe retreat in the Santa Clarita Valley during the 1920s, developing a property associated with the Western screen culture that flourished across the surrounding landscape. The surviving ranch house, stables and bunkhouses preserve that period before the property passed through the Clougherty family and eventually entered public ownership. Santa Clarita opened the historic park for regular public access in 2023, placing the adobe and its outbuildings within the city's historical park network. The progression moves from an early recreational component of planned Valencia through an experimental arts institution that altered American animation, visual art and performance and culminates at a surviving ranch complex carrying the valley's connection with the formative decades of Hollywood Westerns.
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