Why Town Center Drive matters.
Town Center Drive is a polished corridor where Valencia's master-planned character meets late twentieth-century New Urbanist design, civic-scale commerce and an intentionally constructed Main Street conceived as the social center of the Santa Clarita Valley.
Running through Valencia between McBean Parkway and Magic Mountain Parkway, the commercial corridor follows a looping half-mile course around the Central Town Center district immediately north of Valencia Boulevard. Closely spaced storefronts, upper-story offices and residences pull building fronts toward the roadway, with diagonal parking, broad sidewalks and planted pedestrian areas creating dimensions substantially tighter than the six-lane parkways surrounding the district. Traveling around the loop brings hotel, entertainment, retail and residential buildings into a continuous streetscape punctuated by plazas, landscaped passages and connections into adjacent commercial properties. The enclosing urban form contrasts sharply with Valencia's surrounding superblocks, replacing deep setbacks and separated development parcels with a deliberately compact street wall and short walking distances. The result is a corridor whose intimate proportions, continuous facades, pedestrian orientation and enclosed geometry create a concentrated urban center within the expansive suburban plan of Valencia.
What defines Town Center Drive.
Town Center Drive is best known for attempting to construct a traditional Main Street from scratch within Valencia, more than three decades after Newhall Land and Farming Company began developing the master-planned community. Victor Gruen's original 1965 plan reserved the area around Valencia Boulevard and McBean Parkway as the community's commercial and civic center, envisioning a far denser core than the low-rise development that initially emerged. A regional shopping center appeared in that plan but remained unrealized for more than twenty-five years as population growth developed more slowly than Newhall Land originally anticipated. Construction finally began in September 1991 on Valencia Town Center, an $80 million project developed by Newhall Land with JMB Retail Properties on an 80-acre site. The mall opened September 24, 1992 with May Company, J.C. Penney and Sears among its anchors, 110 retail spaces and a 10-screen cinema, giving the Santa Clarita Valley its first regional shopping mall. Newhall Land then pursued a second phase conceived around a street. By 1996 the company was developing a 2,400-foot Main Street on Town Center Drive, reviving the original ambition for a recognizable center within Valencia.
Thomas L. Lee, Newhall Land's chairman and chief executive, pushed the street concept into a $100 million development during the late 1990s, drawing partly on memories of Birmingham, Michigan's traditional downtown and rejecting a future in which Valencia's center consisted solely of a mall surrounded by housing. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill prepared the urban design in collaboration with RTKL, architect of the adjoining shopping center, organizing a 53-foot-wide street with diagonal parking, buildings pulled toward the sidewalk and parking placed behind them. The first structure was completed in 1996, and the project grew to encompass 800,000 square feet of office space above retail, 110 specialty shops, 210 apartments, a six-story hotel and a multiplex cinema. Newhall Land sold the 720,000-square-foot Valencia Marketplace for $111 million in 1998 and directed part of the proceeds toward Town Center Drive, during a year in which the company planned $80 million to $100 million in new commercial investment. Hyatt Valencia opened on the street that year as the Santa Clarita Valley's first full-service hotel and conference center, and Princess Cruises relocated its headquarters from Century City to Valencia with 1,500 jobs. The Urban Land Institute gave Newhall Land an Award of Excellence for Town Center Drive in 2002, completing the transition of a long-reserved planning concept into a nationally recognized attempt to build an urban Main Street inside a postwar new town.
How Town Center Drive fits.
Town Center Drive works as the anchor for a Santa Clarita Valley sequence connecting a surviving Southern Pacific depot with a silent-Western star's hilltop estate and the canyon where California's first major gold discovery preceded the better-known rush to Sutter's Mill.
Begin at Saugus Train Station, created when Southern Pacific completed its Santa Paula branch through the valley in 1887. The two-story combination passenger and freight depot occupied the junction between the new branch and the railroad's main line from Los Angeles, and the settlement of Saugus developed around it. Benjamin Harrison stopped there during his 1891 presidential tour, Theodore Roosevelt passed through in 1903 and Charlie Chaplin later used the station in his 1923 film The Pilgrim. Passenger service ended in 1971 and the depot closed in 1978. Facing demolition, the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society organized a community campaign that financed its relocation to Heritage Junction on June 24, 1980, preserving the last surviving railroad station in the valley. Continue to William S. Hart Museum, the Spanish Colonial Revival mansion built for silent-film star William S. Hart on his Newhall estate. Hart came to California in 1913 after a substantial stage career and became one of silent cinema's leading Western actors, frequently appearing with his pinto horse Fritz. The hilltop house retains Hart's furnishings, personal possessions and collections, including Western art by Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington and Native American textiles and artifacts. Hart left the property for public use, preserving an unusually complete connection between Santa Clarita's ranch landscape and the Western mythology created by early Hollywood. Conclude at Placerita Canyon State Park, where Francisco López encountered gold in 1842, six years before James Marshall's discovery at Sutter's Mill triggered the California Gold Rush. The discovery beneath the celebrated Oak of the Golden Dream initiated mining activity in the canyon and placed the Santa Clarita Valley within California's mineral history before statehood. The progression moves from Southern Pacific's creation of a railroad junction through William S. Hart's silent-Western estate and culminates in the canyon associated with California's pre-Gold Rush mining history, connecting transportation, cinema and mineral discovery across three formative chapters of the Santa Clarita Valley.
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