FEATURE ARTICLE, OCTOBER 2004

GARDEN PARTY IN RANCHO CUCAMONGA
Forest City and Lewis Retail Centers are set to unveil the $285 million Victoria Gardens open-air center.
Haley Shuler

As consumers demand newer and more interesting kinds of shopping experiences to fit their varied lifestyles, developers have continued to search for innovative designs that cater to the shopper of the 21st century. The dream is a single destination that offers countless experiences and satisfies store owners as well as shoppers, families, film buffs, fast food lovers, Saturday night diners and the culturally sophisticated.

Making every building at the center different but unified was a goal for Victoria Gardens’ architects.

While lifestyle centers have grown in popularity over the last 6 years as a solution, developers are realizing there’s still a need for something else — a mall-like facility, but not an enclosed structure, an outdoor shopping “district” but not exactly a lifestyle center. These development concepts have been beautifully blended in the creation of Victoria Gardens.

Nestled on a 147-acre site at the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains lies Victoria Gardens, a new 30-building, $285 million super regional open-air retail center located in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Conceptualized in the late 1990s, it was in early 2001 that the city of Rancho Cucamonga granted approvals for the development of Victoria Gardens. Part lifestyle center, part open-air mall, part entertainment and cultural center, Victoria Gardens officially broke ground on September 16, 2003, and its grand opening is scheduled for October 28, 2004. Forest City California, the Los Angeles-based developer, has partnered with Upland, California-based Lewis Retail Centers to co-develop the project.

The 1.3 million-square-foot Victoria Gardens will feature more than 120 premier stores, a 12-screen movie theater, a cultural center and second-floor office space.

“There really isn’t another project like this in Southern California today, in an open-air configuration which has the ambiance and combines so many aspects of retail,” says Brian M. Jones, president of Forest City California, an affiliate of Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises, Inc. “It has the entertainment aspect; it has the fashion aspect; it has the food and restaurant aspect; it has cultural venues such as a new children’s performing arts center and library; it has offices for the small business owner; and it will have residential living adjacent to and as part of the Town Center. There are not many centers of its kind with that mix.”

Located within the Inland Empire, Rancho Cucamonga is a relatively young community that is experiencing exponential growth, but has no real gathering place for its residents and visitors to shop, dine and recreate.

“The Inland Empire, which includes Rancho Cucamonga, has been one of the fastest, if not the fastest growing parts of the country in the last 5 years,” says Jones. “Victoria Gardens’ location benefits from the foothill corridor Route 210 freeway, bringing in a high demographic customer along the foothills all the way west, back to Pasadena. The Inland Empire today has a population large enough for a project of this scale.”

“It’s a place in Rancho Cucamonga that people can point to as the city’s central gathering retail core,” says Linda Daniels, redevelopment director for the city of Rancho Cucamonga’s economic development agency. “Victoria Gardens will allow the city’s citizens to come together as a community family.”

Though the buying power of the Inland Empire has great potential, residents have often had to travel to find quality entertainment and retail establishments. Rancho Cucamonga has long been regarded as a city that residents commute from, for work and play, and Victoria Gardens is expected to change all that.

“It will keep shopping dollars in the area that are currently escaping,” says Randall Lewis, executive vice president of Lewis Retail Centers, a member of the Lewis Group of Companies. “Its success will send a message to others in the retail community that not only has the Inland Empire arrived as a strong retail marketplace, but its retail scene is ready for a higher grade of stores and restaurants. It will help attract higher-end housing and the desirability to live in this area.”

Daniels agrees that the project is a force in attracting residents and businesses, adding, “Our housing population and residential units are bursting at the seams. Rancho Cucamonga is a popular place to be. It offers better buys in terms of home prices, square footage and land. With more jobs and businesses moving into the area, hopefully fewer people will have to commute. Instead they can transfer or relocate positions.”

The 1.3-million-square-foot Victoria Gardens is not to be confused with the typical enclosed mall.

“It will be a traditional downtown, with streets and open spaces,” says Jones. “The entire project will be an open-air, walking experience, including entertainment, cultural activities, civic uses and many shopping and dining choices, as well as surrounding residential and office components. This downtown will feature stores and entertainment venues set in lushly landscaped streets reminiscent of the early California towns.”

The center will feature more than 120 premier stores with many new to the Inland Empire such as Brighton Collectibles, Coach, Coldwater Creek, Guess, OshKosh B’Gosh Lifestyle, Pottery Barn, Rockport, Talbots, The Apple Store, Thomas Station and Williams-Sonoma to name a few. The five anchor tenants include department stores Macy’s, Robinsons-May and JC Penney totaling 492,000 square feet, a 12-screen AMC Theatres, and the 65,000-square-foot Victoria Gardens Cultural Center, consisting of a library, a 530-seat playhouse and a celebration hall. Other retailers include Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Bath & Body Works and four Gap concepts.

Victoria Gardens will also feature 60,000 square feet of office space above the town square and a Lifestyle Zone, which will include tenants in the cookware, home furnishings and accessories retail segment with easy access parking. A variety of restaurants and eateries will service hungry patrons, with Kabuki Japanese Sushi, Johnny Rockets, Lucille’s Smokehouse Bar-B-Que, P.F Chang’s China Bistro, Tacone and Yard House, all of which are new to the market. The food court, called the Orchard Food Hall, has been set up as a separate market, adding a different architectural aspect to the center. Its design is reminiscent of an old citrus packing shed, which traces its roots back to a nearby winery. In fact, grapes were once grown on the site of Victoria Gardens, tying to the center’s architecture, which is rooted in Southern California.

Along with the Cultural Center, Victoria Gardens will house a police station, to be funded by both sales tax and property tax generated by the center.

“Victoria Gardens is a destination for people to come and enjoy, but it also brings the city revenue to expand its public services and focus more on the priorities of public safety, the cultural center and the library,” says Daniels. Victoria Gardens is expected to produce a combined total of more than $5 million in new retail sales tax, property tax and business license taxes annually.

For the city of Rancho Cucamonga, Victoria Gardens will generate 3,000 new permanent and part-time jobs and act as a catalyst for additional development on surrounding land in the area. “There are spin-off developments under construction on the south side of Foothill Boulevard and the west side of the center, as well as many residential developments sprouting. Victoria Gardens has spurred these developments, partly because of the mall, the tenants and the traffic generators, and also because of the streets. This area was void of public improvement streets, and now with the roadways completed, further developments can take place. There is the infrastructure present to support the additional development resulting from the rising population and incoming traffic,” says Daniels.

The land surrounding Victoria Gardens has been snatched by developers planning ancillary retail centers and residential housing. A new townhouse project recently opened across the street from the center. “It has done very well at prices that are high for the market — $290,000 to upper $300,000s. The housing has sold at a much higher price than we expected. But a key reason for it is being able to live and walk to Victoria Gardens,” says Lewis.

The homes currently springing up around Victoria Gardens are four- and five-bedroom subdivision houses ranging from 2,800 to 4,000 square feet that appeal to a more settled market. More new housing to the surrounding area includes two- and three-bedroom townhouses that are more urban-styled, gearing them toward young professionals.

“We’re beginning to see a non-family market rise in Rancho Cucamonga. Victoria Gardens will be a real magnet for people in their 20s and 30s, young couples and young professionals in the area,” adds Lewis.

Lewis Retail Centers, a long-time developer in the Inland Empire and Rancho Cucamonga, has been involved in some of the entitlement and front-end work, as well as the financial structuring and capital side of the project.

“One of the benefits we brought to the team was not only a local knowledge of the players and some of the consultants, but also an understanding of the city council’s vision and a good understanding of the community — it’s where we’ve done a lot of our projects,” says Lewis.

The architects for the project included Los Angeles-based Altoon + Porter Architects, which designed 24 out of the 30 buildings at Victoria Gardens, with the remaining six split between San Francisco-based Field Paoli Architects and Boston-based Elkus/Manfredi. Cleveland-based KA Architects was the architect of record for 28 of the buildings. Redmond Schwartz Mark Design oversaw environmental graphics and SWA Landscaping was the landscape architect for the project.

Having so many architects involved in the building process only adds to the idea of Victoria Gardens appearing as if it were built over time.

“The whole idea was to develop this history we had imagined for the project,” says Jim Auld of Altoon + Porter. “Some of the buildings are inspired from those closer to the turn of the last century and others are inspired by more modern ones. By regarding Victoria Gardens as a town that evolved over time, North Mainstreet represents the original main street. We imagined that the department stores standing along South Mainstreet would have come along later in the development, which explains why the buildings along that street are more contemporary.”

In designing the layout of Victoria Gardens, the architects kept consumers, as well as efficiency, in mind. “The design infrastructure of streets was mostly geared toward pedestrians and cars. Victoria Gardens is a 16-square grid, similar to what is found in Manhattan, Chicago, and to some extent Los Angeles,” says Auld. The center’s pedestrian-oriented appeal caters to shoppers and store owners alike. Though the distances between the department stores are similar to those in a regional shopping center, the way Victoria Gardens is structured allows pedestrians the opportunities to circle back, circle around and cut through, making those distances seem shorter due to the more interesting and varied route.

“Victoria Gardens provides countless amenities and activities, which are strategically located to increase the amount of time that someone would spend there,” says Auld. In terms of landscaping, mature trees were planted, creating an overall sense of historical longevity as well as shading for shoppers — a sense that the Town Center grew up right along with the community. And Victoria Gardens literally overflows with fountains and other water features, a commodity so important to the growth of the city.

In researching for the project, Forest City visited more than 25 urban shopping areas and centers which have been successful to find out what made certain streets more appealing than others. “We found that the quieter parts of a shopping environment are just as crucial as the high-energy parts of streets,” says Jones. The architects took this information into account during the center’s design stage.

With the opening of Victoria Gardens, the city of Rancho Cucamonga will have leapt from not having a downtown retail area to the creation of a multimillion-dollar lifestyle center at its heart.

“The site has existed as a potential development site for a regional shopping center for 25 years, which is really since the formation of the city and the installation of Interstate 15. Rancho Cucamonga’s residents have been looking for this new city center since that time,” says Auld. The much-anticipated lifestyle center/complex will offer an array of benefits for city residents and businesses alike.

“What does Victoria Gardens mean for Rancho Cucamonga?” asks Daniels. “It’s many things: it’s the economics that the project brings; it’s the recognition that the project brings; and it’s the attractiveness that our residents are finding by having an urban center for shopping, commerce and the arts in their home town.”

Few cities are able to see growth and community cohesion advance at the same pace, but Victoria Gardens has done that for the city of Rancho Cucamonga.

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