A Different Sort of Mall for a California Town

By Morris Newman
New York Times
November 3, 2004

R ANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif. - Visitors to Victoria Gardens, which its creator calls "a superregional lifestyle center,'' may have a sense of the uncanny. Within an area that encompasses 1.3 million square feet of retail and office space covering 12 blocks of this affluent suburb 50 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, they may feel as though they are in a city that has existed for decades. And yet it has actually been open only for less than a week.

A turn-of-the-century citrus-packing plant inspired the building that houses the food court. Next door is a replica Craftsman home, of the type built in this region in the early 1900's. Elsewhere are a group of 1940's-style department stores, as well as an Art Deco building, whose side walls of plain red brick add a note of humility to the elegant facade. (The bricks are actually painted on a stucco surface, in a trompe l'oeil style.) A freestanding brick fireplace, accented with colored tiles, purports to represent the remnant of a rancher's house long destroyed by fire.

The conceit of a built-in history for the $285 million Victoria Gardens is likely to rankle those who insist on historic authenticity in architecture, even though others may be intrigued by the skill of architects in fabricating a downtown that might have been, but never was.

Despite the vein of historical fantasy running through Victoria Gardens, the developers were intent on creating "a real urban place," said Brian Jones, president of Forest City Development California Inc., a Los Angeles-based unit of Forest City Enterprises of Cleveland, which developed the project in a venture with Lewis Retail Centers. "The last thing we wanted to do was a theme park," Mr. Jones added.

Covering 147 acres, Victoria Gardens is one of the latest, and perhaps most sophisticated, of the "town center" projects that try to import the experience of pedestrian-oriented shopping to suburban places. The premise of these outdoor shopping streets is to provide a gathering place as well as retailing, as opposed to car-oriented forms of retailing - notably enclosed regional malls or discount centers - that offer plentiful goods but few places to sit.

"Retail has become polarized, in the form of value versus experience," said Simon Horton, Forest City's project developer.

Although Rancho Cucamonga has been a city for little more than 27 years, the community has a history dating back to the early 19th century, when the area was a Spanish land grant in the shadow of the San Bernardino Mountains a few miles north. With a rich alluvial soil, the rancho rapidly became a farming center of lemon groves and vineyards.

Following an archetypal pattern for suburban growth in Southern California, home builders bought up much of the farmland in the 1970's, building more than 7,000 single-family homes. With mountain views and freeway access to jobs in both Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, Rancho Cucamonga has quadrupled in population since the 1970's, to the present total of 165,000 people.

Forest City, the developer, first entered the city five years ago, responding to a request for proposals from the city for a mall developer. Mr. Jones said he urged city officials to scrap the planned mall and build a project with a more urban character. "It was a shock initially," said Linda Daniels, the city's redevelopment director.

Mr. Jones added, "It took several months to educate the city, and since then they have been behind us all the way."

The presence of a successful regional mall only three miles away, in the city of Ontario, was one factor that made city officials receptive to the town center proposal, according to Ms. Daniels. The notion of a mixed-use development also appealed to officials, who had designated a retail project as the center of a 400-acre redevelopment area.

"We have incorporated entertainment, we have offices and residential, so the project is actually a community gathering place," said Mr. Jones, who plans to build 400 town house units north of the retail site in a second phase.

Many of the merchants initially approached by the developers expressed apprehension that they would not have such traditional amenities as street-front visibility from Foothill Boulevard, the city's main commercial street, or prominent roadside signs, according to Ms. Daniels, the city official.

Among the factors that helped to sway the merchants were the city's high household income and the promise from the city to build a public library and a performing arts center, which are expected to be used by 500,000 people annually.

Currently, the 1.3-million-square-foot mall is 80 percent leased, primarily with national chains. The developers already plan a second phase of 500,000 square feet, to start construction next year.

The site plan is intended to avoid the uniformity of scale of many projects, according to Yann Taylor, a principal of Field Paoli, the San Francisco firm that designed the master plan. "We wanted to avoid a formulaic approach in which all the streets have the same width," he said. Instead, "each street has a slightly different character and is planted with a different type of tree, to contribute to the sense of the project having been built up over time."

Mr. Jones, the developer, said, "The green spaces and open spaces are as important as the buildings." He said the spending on landscaping at Victoria Gardens was six times what he had spent on other regional malls. Much of that expense went to transplanting mature trees at the site.

To avoid a design that was obviously the product of a single designer, the developers hired several firms - including Altoon & Porter of Los Angeles, KA Inc. of Cleveland, Elkus/Manfredi of Boston and Field Paoli - each to contribute several buildings.

According to the architect Ronald Altoon, a principal of Altoon & Porter, the historical theme of Victoria Gardens gave free rein to him and his staff to explore the notion of buildings that clashed with one another. In one case, a reddish-orange building in a 1940's style makes a screaming contrast with some 1970's-style buildings nearby. "The great cities," Mr. Altoon said, "are the ones that have dissonant voices, where buildings sit a little bit uncomfortably next to each other and ask the question, How can that be?"

Despite its urban bravura, Victoria Gardens is an amalgam of the regional mall with elements of traditional town planning. As in a mall, the developer has arranged the merchants in a "dumbbell" formation, with major department stores to the east and west and smaller merchants filling the space between.

Unlike a mall, however, Victoria Gardens follows a city pattern, dividing into a dozen blocks with a regular street grid. Perhaps the most innovative part of the site planning is that the private development has been designed to blend into the existing street pattern of the city by aligning with existing streets.

"This project is not a stand-alone; it is not isolated," Ms. Daniels, the city's redevelopment director, said. Victoria Gardens, rather, is "meant to integrate with the residential neighborhoods that surround it."

Like Geppetto, the fictional puppet maker who wished the wooden Pinocchio could become a real boy, both city officials and developers say they are hoping Victoria Gardens will become an actual city center, not just a themed shopping center.

Putting the project within the city's street grid "will allow it to grow in an organic way, unlike a mall," Mr. Jones said.

For Ms. Daniels, "civic and cultural uses are the things that are going to make it a downtown." Accordingly, the city has started construction on both the new library and the performing arts center as a part of the project's second phase.