Valencia Town Center Drive is the first main

Valencia Town Center Drive is the first main street in California to be built from the ground up in recent decades. The half-mile street is an extension of Valencia Town Center, a regional shopping mall in the master-planned community Valencia, 30 miles north of Los Angeles. Valencia was planned in 1965 and now has 40,000 residents. Town Center Drive has a full mix of uses, including 800,000 square feet of offices above retail, 110 specialty shops, a six-story hotel, a multiplex cinema, and 210 apartment units. According to Marlee Lauffer of Newhall Land, Valencia’s developer, aspects of the main street were included in the original master plan by Victor Gruen. The urban design of Town Center Drive is by SOM (Skidmore Owings & Merrill) Architects, in collaboration with RTKL, which designed the shopping mall. Diagonal parking is allowed along the 53-foot-wide street, and additional parking is available to the rear of buildings. The first structure was completed in 1996, and Town Center Drive is currently about 80 percent complete.