Why you should experience Valencia Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.
Valencia Boulevard is a landscaped corridor where Valencia's master-planned character meets the civic center of the Santa Clarita Valley, rolling foothill terrain and the metropolitan scale of a community conceived largely from open ranchland.
Running through Valencia between Newhall and Saugus, the valley corridor follows an east-west line from Interstate 5 across Rockwell Canyon Road, McBean Parkway and Magic Mountain Parkway before bending toward Bouquet Canyon Road and the older transportation axis along Railroad Avenue. Western stretches emerge from foothills beside Interstate 5 into a broad landscape of planted medians, separated development parcels and slopes rising above the roadway. Traveling east carries the boulevard through Valencia's central commercial and civic district, where substantial setbacks, mature landscaping and large institutional properties preserve the generous dimensions associated with the community's original planning. The alignment approaches older Saugus across flatter ground near the Santa Clara River system, bringing the controlled geometry of Valencia into contact with a settlement pattern rooted in railroad-era Santa Clarita. The result is a corridor whose landscaped width, rolling terrain, separated development clusters and transition between planned Valencia and older Saugus reveal the physical ambitions behind one of Southern California's most consequential postwar new towns.
What you should know about Valencia Boulevard.
Valencia Boulevard is best known for forming a principal east-west axis through Valencia, the master-planned community that Newhall Land and Farming Company began developing during the 1960s. The company descended from the land enterprise incorporated by Henry Mayo Newhall's heirs in 1883, giving the postwar project unusually deep roots in Santa Clarita Valley landholding. Valencia emerged from the original Newhall Ranch property, and Newhall Land enlisted urban designer Victor Gruen to help shape a new community of residential neighborhoods, commercial centers, divided roads and pedestrian paseos. Construction began during the middle of the 1960s, with the first residential phase opening in 1967 and houses selling for about $25,000. Valencia Boulevard and McBean Parkway were already visible crossing largely undeveloped land during this formative period, fixing major circulation lines before much of the surrounding community existed. The boulevard subsequently became a major organizing line as Valencia acquired institutions and employment centers beyond its first residential villages.
By the 1980s, Newhall Land designated the section between McBean and Magic Mountain parkways for office development, and a $14 million, 74,300-square-foot Valencia Plaza designed by Herbert Nadel AIA & Partners rose at 23920 Valencia Boulevard. The corridor's civic importance had begun earlier, when Los Angeles County Supervisor Warren M. Dorn broke ground in February 1970 for the Newhall-Saugus-Valencia Administrative Center near Magic Mountain Parkway. County courts, law enforcement and other public functions concentrated around the complex during the following years. Santa Clarita incorporated in 1987 from communities including Valencia, Newhall, Saugus and Canyon Country, shifting another layer of governmental activity into the new city. By 1993, the Los Angeles Times characterized Valencia Boulevard as one of the community's main streets, citing the concentration of Santa Clarita City Hall, county facilities and Newhall Land headquarters along its course. A roadway drawn through largely open property during Valencia's formative years had become the institutional centerline of the metropolitan community that followed.
How to fold Valencia Boulevard into your trip.
Valencia Boulevard works as the anchor for a Santa Clarita Valley sequence connecting a community college born during the region's postwar expansion with Walt Disney's multidisciplinary arts school and a Western film ranch carrying more than a century of screen production.
Begin at College of the Canyons, created after local voters approved a junior-college district in November 1967 and elected William Bonelli Jr., Edward Muhl, Peter Huntsinger, Sheila Dyer and Bruce Fortine as its first trustees. Robert C. Rockwell became the founding superintendent-president, and the institution adopted the College of the Canyons name in May 1969 after administrator Robert Mouck noticed the extraordinary number of canyons on local topographic maps. Classes began at William S. Hart High School that September with 735 students. The search for a permanent campus examined 45 properties before Newhall Land proposed more than 150 acres beside Interstate 5 near Valencia Boulevard for about $10,000 an acre, then returned 10 percent of the purchase price as a gift. The college moved onto the site in 1970, where modular buildings preceded the permanent campus that developed across the rolling terrain. Continue to California Institute of the Arts, conceived by Walt Disney as a multidisciplinary community where artists working in different fields would develop together. Walt and Roy O. Disney guided the 1961 merger of Nelbert Chouinard's Chouinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, creating CalArts from institutions founded in 1921 and 1883. Walt publicly presented the concept at the 1964 premiere of Mary Poppins, placing the proposed school beside the Music Center and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in his vision for the region's cultural infrastructure. After his 1966 death, H.R. Haldeman chaired the board that appointed Robert W. Corrigan president and Herbert Blau provost in 1967. Blau and a faculty group subsequently developed an educational model influenced by Black Mountain College, and construction began in Valencia in 1969 around a five-level, 500,000-square-foot building designed by Ladd & Kelsey. Conclude at Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio, whose Western sets trace their ancestry to movie-ranch development in Placerita Canyon during the early decades of Hollywood. Ernie Hickson moved his Western sets to the present property in 1936, and Monogram Studios entered a long-term lease the following year. Gene Autry purchased the 110-acre property after Hickson's death in 1952, renamed it Melody Ranch and used it for productions including The Gene Autry Show, Annie Oakley and The Adventures of Champion. An August 1962 fire destroyed 54 structures along with Autry's antique vehicles, costumes and an archive containing 17,000 recordings, ending his plan for a Western museum there. Renaud and Andre Veluzat acquired Autry's surviving 12 acres in 1990 for $975,000 and reconstructed the Western street using historical photographs and footage, returning the property to active production. The progression moves from locally created public higher education through Walt Disney's experiment in multidisciplinary arts training and culminates in a reconstructed Western production complex, tracing three institutions through which the Santa Clarita Valley became a setting for education, artistic invention and screen culture.
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