Abstract
In 1951, the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Walnut Creek welcomed the construction of a major shopping center adjacent to their downtown area—a configuration that would lead municipal planners to prioritize retail development for their city. Walnut Creek’s nonlinear path to retail dominance over the next several decades exemplifies not only the increasingly multivariate climate surrounding suburban retail development in the latter half of the twentieth century but also the increasingly autonomous role of municipal planners who have used retail as a versatile component of suburban spatial development in an age of metropolitan flux.
Keywords
Introduction
On November 3, 2009, residents of the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek headed to the polls to cast their ballots in one of the most contested elections in the city’s history—an event that centered not on a close race between politicians or a controversial tax measure, but on whether or not to permit the construction of a branch of the high-end department store Neiman Marcus at Broadway Plaza, the city’s main shopping center. 1 While the opposing sides offered predictable arguments about tax revenue increases on one hand and increased congestion on the other, the elevated tenor of the debate stemmed from the fact that Broadway Plaza was more than a mere suburban mall for residents. Rather than being cordoned off in a sea of asphalt at a far-flung freeway exit, Walnut Creek’s retail holdings represented something far more central to the city’s civic and spatial identity—a form that planning historian Michael Southworth calls “an amalgam of main street and mall.” 2 Contiguous with the city’s historic downtown, Broadway Plaza anchored an area that offered a blend of big retail and civic vibrancy—a combination that had been key in the area becoming the primary upmarket shopping district for both Contra Costa County and the East Bay region of the San Francisco metropolitan area. Well aware of their enviable asset, the majority of voters—71 percent—supported the new high-end retailer’s arrival, in effect approving the continuation of a retail legacy that had been sixty years in the making. 3
Historians, geographers, and urbanists have given a fair amount of attention to suburban retail but have tended to focus on a few key forces that shaped the establishment of retail centers in suburban municipalities in the formative decades between the end of World War I and the early 1960s. During those years, and particularly in the wake of World War II, the United States witnessed a striking decentralization of retail from the city center to the suburban periphery—a process that entailed a new variety of retail formats. 4 As housing developments, increased automobile use, highways, and rising incomes shaped a landscape of new suburban locales, developers eager to cash in on new markets began building spaces that appealed to the spatial and aesthetic desires of a growing and diversifying demographic of suburban consumers. 5 The consequential rise of new retail formats also drew on the visions of key developers and designers—J. C. Nichols, Victor Gruen, and James Rouse—who espoused specific sociospatial goals for suburban marketplaces that purportedly offered a new experience of metropolitan life. 6
While this important history explains the origins and development of early postwar retail spaces, it offers an incomplete perspective on the relationship between retail development and municipal suburban planning as it unfolded between 1960 and the present—a period when the dynamics of suburban growth and development underwent major changes. During the 1950s, newly sprung municipal planning offices had recognized the significance of retail for future growth prospects, but had served largely as a handmaiden to developers interested in establishing new centers. By the 1970s, however, many suburban planners were dealing with issues like municipal competition, commercial office development, shifting consumer tastes, antigrowth sentiments among residents, and the need to expand tax revenues—all of which had direct and indirect effects on retail planning. At the same time, these years saw an increasing autonomy on the parts of municipal planning offices which were no longer allying solely with developers as they often had in the immediate postwar years. The result was an increasingly dynamic climate in which suburban planners could use retail space to help shape their municipalities according to varied demands and needs, all in an increasingly careful negotiation with developers.
The history of Walnut Creek’s journey to retail dominance epitomizes these important trends and dynamics, and the present article traces this story in three periods: an initial phase during which planners allied with developers to generate a centripetal plan for downtown-focused development, which focused around the successful Broadway Shopping Center; a subsequent phase marked by retail decline, increasing autonomy for municipal planners, and a shift toward commercial office development that primed the city for an eventual return to retail; and a final phase of ramped-up retail projects that demonstrate a new level of negotiation between planners, residents, and developers in an era of shifting retail standards. In these three phases, we can chart the largely untold story of a postwar retail development’s ascension to retail dominance through a series of both direct and indirect consequences of local planning decisions, metropolitan growth patterns, resident sentiments, and developer interests—all of which contributed to Walnut Creek’s position as a modestly sized suburb with impressive retail holdings. Most important, the city’s retail history lays bare the evolving role of municipal planners; as visions of suburban life changed, so did planners’ efforts to defend a certain vision of suburban space that balanced the revenue benefits of retail with more qualitative considerations.
The Commercial Vanguard (1950–1970)
Developer and corporate interests brought the modern shopping center to Walnut Creek in 1951, smack in the middle of the postwar period when the number of such centers in the United States grew from several hundred in 1945 to nearly 3,000 by 1960. 7 The primary initiator was San Francisco developer Graeme MacDonald who honed in on Walnut Creek’s potential to be the shopping hub for suburbanizing Contra Costa County, a nominally minor but promising region of the San Francisco Bay Area located just over the Contra Costa Range (now known as the East Bay Hills) from Oakland, some fifteen miles inland from San Francisco Bay (Figure 1). Like many developers of the era, MacDonald knew that postwar metropolitan dispersion called for shopping centers that were regional rather than local in their drawing power. While it had been incorporated in 1914, Walnut Creek boasted only about 2,400 inhabitants in 1950. Yet, MacDonald knew that it sat at the geographic center of a vast trade area east of the East Bay Hills that had a much larger population, making it a prime spot for a new venture. 8 MacDonald was not alone in spotting this potential. Department stores nationwide were opening suburban branches to target new markets, and officials from the J. C. Penney Corporation had their eye on Walnut Creek as a potential site. 9 The company ultimately combined forces with MacDonald, who laid out a full-scale shopping center anchored not only by Penney’s but also by Sears, Roebuck & Company, and the high-end I. Magnin Co. of San Francisco. 10
Walnut Creek (highlighted in black) sits at the convergence of Interstate 680 and Highway 24 in the Contra Costa County region of the San Francisco Bay Area, some fifteen miles inland from the Bay and across the East Bay Hills from the cities of Berkeley and Oakland. Map by the author.
Conceived before the rise of the enclosed mall format, the plan for the open-air Broadway Shopping Center boasted key elements of the so-called community or district centers that developers started building between the late 1940s and early 1950s. 11 Its mix of thirty-eight outlets encompassed department store anchors along with small retailers, a supermarket, and a gas station—previously separated entities that developers had begun to cluster in larger developments in the name of competitiveness and that could easily accommodate a range of consumption needs for an expansive demographic. 12 Developers had begun to view these centers as counterparts to the central city but had designers give them an overall air of convenience, efficiency, unity, and informality that accorded with suburban tastes. 13 Situated along a wide, T-shaped drive, Broadway Shopping Center boasted the spatial and aesthetic hallmarks characteristic of this new format, including low-slung, modernist buildings in red brick, uniform signage, covered walkways, tasteful landscaping, and copious parking in angled street spaces and hidden lots 14 (Figures 2 and 3).
An aerial view of Broadway Plaza in 1951, looking southeast, with construction nearing completion. Main Street is the thoroughfare that cuts diagonally across the lower third of the image. Courtesy of the Walnut Creek Historical Society.
The shopping center’s original main entrance of Main Street featured a wide drive, ample parking, and both small retailers and large department stores. Courtesy of the Walnut Creek Historical Society.
If the metropolitan location and format of Broadway Shopping Center were standard for suburban development patterns, its specific position within Walnut Creek reflected something less typical—and ideal for the interests of MacDonald and his collaborators. Architectural Forum described many of the new community centers of the era as “markets in the meadows” for their far-flung locations away from concentrated settlement, but the developer’s ideal was to construct centers that meshed commerce with civic activity—a configuration that prefigured Victor Gruen’s later visions of such centers as “crystallization points for suburbia’s community life.” 15 Plenty of new shopping centers idealized the downtown aesthetic on cheap land along highways, particularly in suburban areas without established centers, but Walnut Creek possessed an established commercial core—the result of a long-term isolation from the main cities of the Bay Area as well as a geographic position that puts it at the center of the Contra Costa County trade area. 16 Most important, this downtown strip was situated at the county’s most prominent intersection, the nexus point of State Routes 24 (Mount Diablo Boulevard) and 21 (Main Street), which led, respectively, to Oakland and the other inland suburbs of Contra Costa County. Locals called this intersection “the Corners” for its geographic and commercial status—a designation MacDonald doubtless took into account when he decided to construct Broadway Shopping Center on the intersection’s southeastern quadrant, adjacent to Walnut Creek’s small but vibrant downtown strip. 17 At the time of Broadway Shopping Center’s construction (and into the 1960s and 1970s), Main Street boasted a characteristically healthy assortment of mid-range, locally owned specialty shops—businesses like Contra Costa Stationers, Allen’s Shoes, the Ramona Theater, and Leo’s Jewelry. 18
When Broadway Shopping Center opened on October 11, 1951, as the first major shopping center east of the East Bay Hills, it immediately gave Walnut Creek an economic boost and competitive edge—a welcome development for a community no longer reaping the benefits of its agricultural past. 19 Brad Rovanpera, a former public information officer for the city, writes that “[i]n one broad stroke, the opening of the center changed the financial fortunes of a sleepy downtown” and “helped solidify Walnut Creek’s reputation as the crossroads and the commercial vanguard of the East Bay.” 20 In the first year of operation, the stores earned the city US$202,186 in sales tax revenue (approximately US$1.8 million today). 21
Early photos of Broadway Shopping Center suggest that the center was constructed in stages, as capital and the market warranted. Within just a few years, the success attracted outlets that exhibited the newest trends in architectural style and scale; in 1954, Capwell’s—a division of the Emporium-Capwell Company of San Francisco—opened a branch at the southern end of the center 22 (Figure 2). Reflecting the newest phase of department store design, Capwell’s immense white facade loomed over the development to capture the gaze of passing motorists, many of whom were flocking to Walnut Creek as their primary marketplace 23 (Figure 4). With this addition of another major department store, Walnut Creek boasted a definitively regional center.
This postcard, dated 1970, offers an aerial view (looking northward) of Broadway Shopping Center and downtown (upper left), and in general reflects the original layout, albeit with some additions. The large building in the center right is Capwell’s Department Store, which opened in 1954. The fact that postcards foregrounded shopping space suggests its importance for Walnut Creek’s reputation and identity in these years of suburban boom. Courtesy of Scott Parsons.
City officials quickly took note, as they had been eyeing ways to shape Walnut Creek into something more than a mere bedroom community. As a result of the 1947 state legislation mandating (albeit without a system of accountability) general plans for independent municipalities, Walnut Creek’s municipal planning office was also thinking in terms of overall municipal land use and development. However, like many planning departments of the era, Walnut Creek’s seems to have been interested more in serving as a handmaiden to developers; planning documents were prepared not by planning staff and public employees but by private-sector consultants who encouraged progrowth tactics of maximizing municipal prowess. 24
The city’s first official plan, the 1953 Preliminary Plan for Walnut Creek, was prepared by consultant Harold Wise and proposed leveraging the retail success of Broadway Shopping Center to diversify the commercial activities of downtown mainly to expand the city’s employment base. From Wise’s view, the activity generated by Broadway Shopping Center was a harbinger for a diverse and dominant commercial center that would stand as the employment hub of the region. 25 While new suburban retail often competed with Main Street, Walnut Creek found itself in the enviable position of using Broadway Shopping Center to empower downtown. 26 The goal was a higher and more multifaceted level of commercial dominance, which could be attained through a concerted development of light industry and material processing in addition to existing retail, all within the boundaries of the downtown area. 27 In an era characterized by the centrifugal impulses of metropolitan dispersal, this was a highly centripetal vision.
Transportation improvements and explosive population growth during the 1960s further buttressed Walnut Creek’s retail strengths, much to the satisfaction of the growth coalition. In March 1960, the city became the nexus point for two major freeways—California Highway 24 (formerly coterminous with Mount Diablo Boulevard) and Interstate 680—which better connected the city with San Francisco and the East Bay to the west, Concord to the north, and the growing Danville/San Ramon/Pleasanton corridor to the south. 28 Residential boom was swift, with the city’s population quadrupling from 9,903 to 39,844 between 1960 and 1970. 29 Halfway through the decade, the bourgeoning population recognized the need for a more supportive civic infrastructure that could match the sophistication of new metropolitan networks, and in 1965, 85 percent of voters approved a US$6.8 million bond issue to cover a comprehensive set of roadway and utility improvements. 30
As these improvements and the swelling population were turning Walnut Creek into a bona fide suburban city, Broadway Shopping Center continued to thrive in its central location. The new freeways—so often the handmaiden of spatial reorganization in postwar suburbs and a death knell for historic suburban centers—had actually galvanized downtown’s qualities of centrality and convergence. Because the geometry of Highway 24 and Interstate 680 essentially paralleled that of Mount Diablo Boulevard and State Route 21 (Main Street), the new freeway interchange hugged the center of town (Figure 5). The Main Street area and Broadway Plaza Shopping Center consequently sat less than half of a mile from the freeway nexus—near enough to enjoy the benefit of proximity, but far enough away so that downtown did not feel like it sat in the shadows of overpasses. City leaders recognized their good fortune and consequently moved to buttress the civic core in a national moment when highways were sending areas of dense activity—whether in urban centers or suburban downtowns—into decline. 31 Contra Costa County’s exploding suburban population would continue to seek shopping alternatives to downtown Oakland or San Francisco’s Market Street, and Walnut Creek’s leaders looked to leverage the newly reinforced centrality of their downtown area for the continued health of retail.
The construction of the Interstate 680/Highway 24 Interchange in the late 1950s solidified Walnut Creek’s centrality to the region, thereby galvanizing its retail offerings. This 1958 photo shows the construction of the interchange from the west. Broadway Shopping Center is located in the top right corner. Courtesy of the Contra Costa County Historical Society.
As new formats of decentralized retail were emerging—most notably the enclosed, climate-controlled mall—Walnut Creek doubled down in proposing a dense, walkable downtown. The 1966 Core Area General Plan/Civic Center Cultural Plan, prepared by consulting firm Rush and Krushkov, outlined a more carefully coordinated and circumscribed city center than did the 1953 plan, albeit with similar goals. It also presented the expansion of downtown Walnut Creek’s retail offerings not only in the name of consumer needs and demands but also in the interest of building a magnetic civic core that would further become a regional “drawing power.” 32 By bringing together large numbers of private developers and emphasizing economic diversification in downtown Walnut Creek, the city’s planners hoped to facilitate a spatial and symbolic transformation of downtown space beyond the boundaries of Broadway Shopping Center, ultimately beating out other growing communities for employment and tax base. 33
The problem with this particular document was its lack of details and awareness of social realities. Like many other planning departments, Walnut Creek’s employed a generation of planners who had been schooled in the theories of T. J. Kent, a prominent California planner and academic who had argued in his widely read volume The Urban General Plan (1964) that plans should be limited to physical planning issues. Walnut Creek’s 1966 plan reflects Kent’s model in this respect, and as such stood as a seemingly comprehensive vision that was unspecific. 34
Ironically, the very dynamism of retail development that Walnut Creek was harnessing for its long-term plans would end up derailing the city’s vision. In 1967, a major developer proposed the opposite of what city planners and consultants envisioned—a new enclosed mall in line with prevailing industry standards, to be located on a newly developing stretch of land along Ygnacio Valley Road, three miles northeast of downtown. 35 This proposed center could certainly fulfill the planning goals of boosting retail and property tax revenues, but its location and format would cannibalize the downtown expansion plans. 36 Putting downtown health above fiscal concerns, the city rejected the proposal, only to their own detriment. The developer deflected to a site five miles north along Interstate 680 in neighboring Concord, opened the larger, enclosed Sunvalley Mall the following year, and gradually lured Broadway Shopping Center’s customers and tenants with an impressive facility. Even Sear’s, one of Walnut Creek’s original tenants, chose to leave for the more en vogue center. 37
This outcome underlined an all-too-frequent and cruel irony of suburban heath: that retail development could be as much a curse as a blessing when multiple municipalities shared a common market. If the arrival of the modern shopping center in the early 1950s had brought retail promise and commercial power to Walnut Creek, as well as helped catalyze ambitious planning goals, the city’s strict adherence to its downtown development vision and a single retail format ultimately undermined its own health. According to former Councilwoman Peg Kovar, the situation was bleak: “Downtown needed help …. By the early ‘70s it was pretty ugly.” 38 Such words were usually reserved for central city districts reeling from chronic disinvestment, but Walnut Creek revealed that suburbs opposed to prevailing development trends were no less immune to the phenomenon of economic stagnation.
To the Edge and Back (1970–1990)
As Concord’s new mall ate into Walnut Creek’s retail base during the 1970s, a subsequent development further diverted city planners’ attention away from pursuing their retail-oriented downtown. The new development began in the late 1960s, when Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), the nascent rail system for the greater San Francisco area, announced plans for a line running from Oakland to Concord that would include a Walnut Creek station. The rail’s planned path—paralleling Highway 24 and then turning north along Interstate 680—would skirt the northwest corner of central Walnut Creek, and the new station would sit at the intersection of California Boulevard and Ygnacio Valley Road, proximal to downtown, but nonetheless on the diametrically opposite end of it from Broadway Shopping Center (Figure 6).
The location of the Golden Triangle, adjacent to the BART station at the northwest end of downtown, was at the opposite end of the city center from Broadway Plaza and the historic part of downtown. Antigrowth advocates halted the further development of office space before city leaders could connect the two areas by pedestrianizing the automobile-oriented area along California Boulevard and Main Street. Map by the author.
The clear opportunities for growth around this new transit connection eclipsed any lingering sentiment for downtown retail expansion. City planners were under pressure to seek out potential areas of revenue that were not tied to residential development—key in a suburb like Walnut Creek where residents expected premium public services without the burden of higher property taxes. With retail taxes waning in light of Concord’s new mall, city officials shifted their attention to the possibilities of office development in conjunction with the arrival of BART. In the 1971 General Plan, planners set out to pursue developing the area around the new transit hub, noting that the “[d]evelopment and expansion of major public-oriented facilities such as the … Walnut Creek Rapid Transit Station” could stimulate “intensive high-rise development nearby.” 39
This planning reorientation reflected an awareness of the growing trend of corporate expansion in affluent suburbs. As the national political economy had catalyzed the expansion of white-collar, middle-management staffs during the 1960s and 1970s, corporations searched for financially viable office locations away from the expensive properties of the central city. 40 Walnut Creek boasted key elements that were attractive to developers of back-office space, including relatively cheap land, attractive residential real estate, and a proximity and connectivity to transport nodes. 41 The city’s population boom during the 1970s had also supplied a necessary component for the emerging corporate economy: a population of educated, affluent, and underemployed women. 42 If the city no longer had the ingredients to develop the retail core, they did have those required to generate a build-up of commercial office space.
City officials were also experiencing a shift in the complexion and responsibilities of the municipal planning office. In 1971, California had passed another round of its general plan legislation in response to public concerns about sprawl and environmental impacts. The amendments required local jurisdictions to have general plans that were in harmony with their zoning ordinances and also expanded the number of mandatory components required in a general plan. Components once relegated, if at all, to metropolitan planning commissions were now the responsibility of municipal planning offices. A complete general plan now dealt with land use, circulation, housing, conservation, and a complete plan for economic diversification. 43
These increased planning demands resulted in an expansion of the Community Development Department staff of the Walnut Creek Planning Department, which began, for the first time in the city’s history, preparing its own plans. 44 While the city’s 1971 General Plan laid out the broad goal of enhancing Walnut Creek’s position as the professional office center, the more specific Core Area Plan of 1975 expressed a new perspective on the role of the city’s planners. Citing the growth of the 1950s and 1960s as having been too quick and inadequately controlled, the city’s planners expressed a clear break from the previous reliance on progrowth, consultant-oriented planning. 45 This shift was also accompanied by one in which the planning functions were fully in the hands of public employees, making planning an entity that had to be responsive to voters. 46
Walnut Creek’s planning reorientation transformed the downtown landscape during the subsequent decade. After BART service began in 1973, the area bounded by I-680, Main Street, and California Boulevard germinated a cluster of steel and glass buildings as city planners approved the development of some 6.5 million square feet of office space between 1975 and 1985. 47 Christened the “Golden Triangle” in accordance with new development parlance, this phase of development sidelined any further retail development downtown, despite being only a mile and a half away. 48 Planners had not abandoned their goals of strengthening downtown but were now aiming to achieve them by linking the civic core to the new corporate center to the north. By promoting mixed-use, high-density construction, and pedestrian friendly space in the Golden Triangle—an approach that kept the area in line with the city’s general plan—planners hoped to shape the area in ways that would effectively link it with the civic core and Broadway Shopping Center to the south 49 (Figure 6). The resulting agglomeration of office space and retail along the freeway and BART line would, of course, qualify Walnut Creek as an emerging edge city. 50
Greater spatial circumstances undercut planners’ intentions. The Golden Triangle was separated from the older downtown area by a low-density, car-oriented area of strip malls and busy arterials, and without any useful pedestrian linkages traversing this space, the Golden Triangle remained isolated. More important, insufficient roadways and an increasing flow of commuters on Ygnacio Valley Road—the six-lane artery dividing the Golden Triangle from the rest of central Walnut Creek—made for intense congestion, prompting rising animosity from residents. By the mid-1980s, these sentiments reached a breaking point. The traffic problems, coupled with the sudden appearance of glass and steel buildings, led many to perceive the squatty new skyline as an ersatz financial district symbolizing rapid, unwanted change in their quiet suburb 51 (Figure 7). These residents were primed for such anxieties; inflation in the Bay Area housing market during the late 1970s and early 1980s had led to a windfall for most homeowners who were consequently on high alert with respect to any negative influences on real-estate values. The fast urbanization by the BART station qualified as a severe threat, and in 1985, an antigrowth group called Citizens for a Better Walnut Creek proposed a measure that would halt further construction of commercial office space in the city. 52 While many were supportive of the of the Golden Triangle for its fiscal value, the opposition won out; Measure H passed narrowly, abruptly halting Walnut Creek’s edge-city experiment. 53
The office developments of the Walnut Creek’s Golden Triangle galvanized both a demand for better retail and less vertical development during the early 1980s. The Bay Area Rapid Transit track is visible in the middle ground. Courtesty of the Contra Costa County Historical Society.
As it turned out, the prospect of retail growth would help the city negotiate its way out of the partly botched edge-city phase, which, while halted, had shaped Walnut Creek’s demographic in ways that made retail development feasible again to city planners and developers. High-paying white-collar jobs in the new buildings of the Golden Triangle had attracted a broader demographic of middle management types whose propensity for mid-to-high-end retail was strong, and whose tastes were likely left unsatisfied by Broadway Shopping Center’s offerings. 54 Indeed, a 1982 citywide poll had indicated that residents wanted to see an enlarged shopping center somewhere in the city. 55 This demand, along with the fact that a shift of attention back to the historic center would symbolize a more acceptable scale of development for many residents, prompted city leaders to turn back to the possibilities of downtown retail development, this time with a more upmarket approach. Citizens would surely welcome projects that reproduced their visions of suburban quietude and privilege, and, more important, they had the demands and income to support high-end retail. And because the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 had effectively frozen property tax revenues, municipal planners across the state were pressured to encourage land developments that would translate into boosts in revenue.
At the same time as the edge-city chapter was coming to a close, a number of business deals were already changing Broadway Shopping Center in significant ways. In 1984, Seattle-based Nordstrom replaced Bullock’s department store (formerly I. Magnin Co.) as the result of a major corporate buyout, and a year later, Macerich—a Santa Monica-based retail developer with a knack for reviving underperforming, high-potential centers—purchased the entire Broadway Shopping Center property. Macerich spotted a huge amount of potential in a centrally located, outdoor mall in a city of affluent professionals. Enclosed regional malls had enjoyed a golden period between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, but the saturation of the market began to precipitate new forms of shopping spaces, many of which reverted to close-knit, open-air layouts that evoked a vague sense of urban street energy and the quaintness of a small town Main Street. 56 Consumers were increasingly interested in shopping spaces that felt less constrained and managed and that were more diversified in their goods and services. 57 Broadway Shopping Center, relatively unappealing during the reign of regional malls like Concord’s Sunvalley and Pleasanton’s Stoneridge, was ideal for such an environment, with its basic outdoor format and unusual proximity to downtown, its potential evocation of Main Street life would be all the more legitimate. Broadway Shopping Center could, after a period of quietude, once again help mold the municipal focus, both spatially and symbolically.
Macerich also knew that the old-fashioned center needed a substantial makeover, given that the incremental construction of its various phases showed in its overall lack of architectural and aesthetic cohesion (Figure 8). They immediately undertook a multimillion-dollar face-lift of the jumbled aesthetic into that of an aesthetically cohesive and sophisticated outdoor marketplace. Retaining the basic footprint and form of the buildings and primary roadways, designers spruced up the main walkways of the center and reconfigured the back loading dock into a promenade reminiscent of a European alley, adding brick pavers, awnings, greenery, and fountains throughout the center to enhance the pedestrian-oriented aesthetic. 58 The biggest change was the closing of the drive of Main Street, which designers converted into a cross between a promenade and a square—the eponymous space highlighted in the center’s upgraded name, Broadway Plaza. The new name evoked the pleasant and timeless public spaces of Europe that they seemed to be emulating, as well as nodded to Kansas City’s famous Country Club Plaza, arguably the oldest (and the most iconic) suburban retail center in the country. 59
Macerich’s renovations during the mid-1980s reshaped the motley aesthetic of the incrementally built center (left) into a more cohesive, genteel marketplace (right). Courtesy of the Contra Costa County Historical Society.
If the 1989 General Plan for the city is any indication, the new Broadway Plaza was a success, and one that city officials hoped to build upon. Seeing the potential to expand on the newly redeveloped shopping district, the 1989 Plan laid out a vision that saw the city’s future not in built-up glass and steel but in pleasant and approachable downtown shopping that would shape the city’s identity around a small-town—rather than an edge-city—feel. To this end, the new plan championed “small-town ambience” in “pedestrian areas downtown and the single family neighborhoods,” noting that “[w]hile some new Class I office space may be constructed, the emphasis will be on retail commercial development.” 60 Growth control measures saw that commercial development was limited. When the California Supreme Court ruled Measure H unconstitutional the same year, city planners began forging a comprehensive set of growth control measures that were introduced in phases between 1990 and 1996. In 1993, the City Council amended the general plan to limit commercial growth at 75,000 square feet annually, and within three more years, all elements of planning, including the city’s zoning ordinance, were brought into compliance with new growth control measures. 61 In the ten years from 1993 to 2003, only 620,000 square feet of commercial space was built. 62
The shopping district anchored by Broadway Plaza had once again come to guide the city’s planning goals, yet despite the ways in which downtown Walnut Creek was poised for success, planners still faced challenges. Macerich’s renovations of Broadway Plaza had improved the retail environment but had also made the center stand apart from the traditional downtown in a more obvious way. The relatively small retail spaces on either side of Main Street in the civic core contrasted with the larger dimensions of Broadway Plaza. In parallel, these two halves of downtown also boasted stores of a different character; Broadway Plaza attracted national retailers and boutique chains, while downtown was a more motley collection of location businesses and small shops. 63 It did not help that the roadways separating Broadway Plaza from the surrounding downtown properties—Main Street and Mount Diablo Boulevard—were wide, heavily trafficked thoroughfares scaled more toward the needs of cars than pedestrians.
Smoothing over the spatial and environmental differentiation between these spaces was imperative to achieve the sort of cohesive blend of retail and Main Street that planners and residents wanted. Yet planners also wanted to increase the footprint of corporate retail in the areas around Broadway Plaza to enhance their competitiveness against retail clusters in other suburbs. The solution to this challenge lay in proper scale and design. Planners knew they had to shape an overall environment that was cohesive yet varied; a sense of organicism was critical in making the area feel more like a suburban town center and less like a shopping mall. Planners thus encouraged developers and architects to produce designs that made new construction appear as if it had been built incrementally over a long period, not in a spurt of fast growth that had been so off-putting in the case of the Golden Triangle. 64 A patina of history—however, abstract and contrived—was key to giving Walnut Creek the ideal shopping environment that pulled city and mall together.
Between 1997 and 1999, city planners passed two localized plans—the East Mt. Diablo Boulevard Specific Plan and the Locust Street Extension Block Plan—to spur the coordinated development of retail space in line with their aesthetic and spatial goals. 65 The earliest development to result was Broadway Pointe, a strip of stores built in 1997 across Mount Diablo Boulevard from the north end of Broadway Plaza. Replacing a block of small downtown outlets, including the location of the city’s first bank, Broadway Pointe was considered a “bridge project” by the city planners and developers, who envisioned that the new development, by more closely resembling Broadway Plaza, would pull shoppers across Mount Diablo Boulevard into the traditional downtown 66 (Figure 9).
The approved development projects on the northern and western sides of Broadway Plaza extended big retail spaces into the traditional downtown but smoothed over the apparent scale differences with aesthetic treatments and roadway renovations. Map by the author.
The eventual design for the 75,000 square-foot, two-story building—the work of San Francisco architect Hans Rainer Baldauf—offered a style and proportion that blended with Broadway Plaza while still bearing an aesthetic likeness to the traditional downtown; store facades were stylistically and chromatically varied but shared common proportions that would accommodate big retail 67 (Figure 10, left). Behind its variegated facade, Broadway Pointe contained spaces for three restaurants, four large stores, a new bank branch, and a 230-space parking garage—key elements for the scale of retail and dining the city hoped to attract along the perimeter of Broadway Plaza. To complete the aesthetic link to the existing mall, designers integrated Broadway Pointe’s storefront into the newly renovated Liberty Bell Plaza at the northwest corner of the Mount Diablo Boulevard and Broadway. With a central fountain and al fresco dining space on its perimeter, the plaza gave shoppers an open gathering space redolent of a European square—much like the open square just across Mount Diablo Boulevard within Broadway Plaza’s property. 68
The new building projects greenlighted by the city’s planning office have extended big retail into the periphery of Broadway Plaza. Broadway Pointe (left) and Plaza Escuela (right). Courtesy of the Walnut Creek Historical Society.
While the large storefront facades of the new structure extended Broadway Plaza’s marketplace aesthetic, it was the renovation of the street that was the most important change for shaping a pedestrian friendly, small-town ambience that linked the two areas. As Michael Southworth explains, Mount Diablo Boulevard served as a significant barrier between the retail space of Broadway Plaza and the downtown public space across the street, and bridging these two fundamentally separate spaces was critical to making the downtown feel like an integrated space where civic livelihood and retail coexisted. 69 With the construction of Broadway Pointe, planners transformed the heavily trafficked road into a more sedate thoroughfare that seemed to unify the space on either side of the street. A planted median landscaped with trees, uniform light fixtures on both sides of the street, and illuminated crosswalks surfaced with stone pavers identical to those on the sidewalk unified the streetscape and oriented it toward pedestrians. 70
Only a few years later, three major shopping developments across Main Street from Broadway Plaza extended the retail streetscape theme westward. The Corners (2003), a 33,000 square-foot center developed by Lamorinda Development and Investment, featured Tiffany & Co. and Apple as anchors, and established a half-block of high-end retail on the southwestern quadrant of the Main Street/Mount Diablo Boulevard intersection. 71 Even larger was Olympia Place (2002), a 143,000-square-foot development across Locust Street developed by Blake Hunt Ventures. More modest in its retail complexion compared to The Corners, Olympia Place included space for nine tenants as well as office space and a fourteen-screen cinema. 72 It was Blake Hunt Ventures’ hefty, 164,900-square-foot Plaza Escuela (2002), however, that was the largest structure to go up downtown since the 1950s—nearly taking up the entirety of the two blocks between Main Street and California Boulevard. With a range of small and large-scale shops and eateries that included Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, The Container Store, and Men’s Wearhouse, Plaza Escuela substantially extended a diverse blend of pedestrian-oriented retail several blocks beyond the boundaries of Broadway Plaza 73 (Figure 10, right).
Walnut Creek’s planners considered Plaza Escuela especially critical because of its location off of Olympic Boulevard, which is a major access road into downtown from the Highway 24/Interstate 680 interchange. When they felt that the initial renderings were not substantial enough of a visual and environmental entrance, they sent the plans back to the drawing board, seeking the expertise of Broadway Pointe’s designers to come up with a structure that would serve as a gateway into downtown, an extension of existing retail spaces, and an inviting pedestrian environment. 74 The elements of the final design were similar in function to those of Broadway Pointe; they meshed with the neighboring developments at the same time as they were stylistically differentiated. 75 The incorporation of street trees, lighting, brick sidewalks, and fountains enhanced the pedestrian experience.
An even more significant feature was the extension of Locust Street, which previously terminated at Olympic Boulevard, southward through the development to extend the downtown grid—a move that both created another pedestrian-oriented thoroughfare in the area and allowed increased access to the two large parking garages tucked away in the upper floors. 76 The latter addition had become standard for new developments. The city had added an additional public parking garage in the mid-1990s, and most major developments included multilevel garages somewhere behind the facades. In 1995, the city also began a free shuttle service running between Broadway Plaza and the BART station, with intermittent stops in downtown. 77 City officials were well aware of residents’ aversions to increased congestion, and worked to maintain an atmosphere redolent of a calm and uncongested town center, even though downtown was becoming an increasingly dense and popular landscape. 78
Retail Dominance (1990–2015)
If Walnut Creek’s intensified retail development spoke to the city’s insistence on honing an appealing set of spaces for residents and shoppers, the success of those spaces rested on the fact that they appealed to a changing set of expectations for suburban space. In particular, Walnut Creek’s blend of Main Street and mall put it in line with the emerging industry standard for upscale retail—a status that would bring the area even not only more popularity but also engender a more high-stakes attitude on the parts of both developers and city officials. This most recent chapter has seen the most engaged involvement of the city’s planning division in directing the retail developments toward a specific and cohesive vision for the downtown area—one that includes significant spatial and aesthetic considerations. It has also witnessed municipal planners pushing back against developer plans to ensure the execution of a specific vision that would satisfy multiple parties.
During the 1990s, developers nationwide had faced flooded markets for enclosed malls as well as changing consumer demand, which began to prefer “experiential retail,” or shopping that felt as much like a lifestyle or social experience as a utilitarian one. 79 To confront these challenges, they introduced a series of new spatial and aesthetic formats that came to be most commonly known as “lifestyle centers,” which featured open-air, retail-focused, mixed-use environments. Compared to enclosed malls, lifestyle centers were more pedestrian-friendly, boasted more architectural variance, and aimed to evoke a sense of connection with the civic landscape rather than standing as a conspicuously separate marketplaces. Michael Southworth dubbed these new centers “townscape malls” for their suggestion of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Main Street. 80 And if these areas seemed less conspicuously commercial, they were often unabashedly upscale; they boasted a far more dressed up sense of exterior and interior spaces and catered to a more circumscribed, affluent demographic than did the typical mall. 81
Partly by accident and partly by planning, downtown Walnut Creek boasted these elements, as well as several bonus features that made it an even more legitimate environment for consumers seeking a more exclusive and environmentally pleasing alternative to the enclosed mall. Stocked with high-end labels, as well as extensive dining and entertainment options, Walnut Creek also boasted a spatial integration with a functional and established downtown—an element often lacking in many new developments built on greenfield sites along freeways. Many lifestyle centers were also striking in how they combined elements associated with both urban and suburban lifestyles—an aspect at which Walnut Creek excelled. Often called “urban villages,” a term that evoked both quaintness and cosmopolitanism, lifestyle centers boasted the premium labels, glitzy spaces, density, bustle, and sense of style often associated with the glamour of the central city, as well as the more mainstream convenience, socioeconomic circumscription, and small-scale environment of the suburbs. The result was a type of circumscribed urban experience. As John King, the design critic for the San Francisco Chronicle writes, suburbs like Walnut Creek were “not so much suburban as sub-urbane,” offering “a dash of cosmopolitanism and a sense of something real, but … without an edge.” 82
Walnut Creek’s tireless provision of parking, sense of highly controlled spatial uses, and abundance of small-town vibes in the Main Street corridor shaped a spirit of suburbanism, while the increasingly intensified retail built up around Broadway Plaza, despite its sense of connection with the small-scale setting, housed a variety, density, and glitz that called to mind the energy of the downtown core. Far more than an ersatz shopping village, downtown Walnut Creek offered an expanding collection of upmarket outlets, which began to increase in number after Macerich began courting increasingly high-end retailers to the area beginning in the mid-1990s. 83 Local real-estate leaders were, of course, enthusiastic to tout the urbane sophistication of this environment as a symbol of refinement vis-à-vis other municipalities. “Walnut Creek is no longer a suburban downtown, it is an urban center,” wrote one such leader. 84
By 2004, Walnut Creek’s retail offerings and unique environment had put it in direct competition with the Bay Area’s other exclusive shopping districts. When the San Francisco Chronicle discussed the suburb’s benefits with respect to Union Square, it noted that it offered a dense, pedestrian-oriented environment along with a higher degree of accessibility and spatial legibility. Visitors could both feel like they were engaging in commercial life of a real urban place but not be restricted in their mobility or parking options. 85 Freeway connections and a BART link (with free shuttle service to the heart of downtown), plus copious parking options in the immediate area, meant that Walnut Creek was highly accessible to Bay Area Residents. And unlike the Shops at Corte Madera in Marin County and Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto—the two other dominant upmarket shopping centers in the metropolitan area outside of San Francisco—Walnut Creek was both more easily accessible and meshed its outdoor offerings with a Main Street environment.
Walnut Creek’s planners realized that the key to maintaining this environment was a sense of balance—an evenhandedness that essentially shaped two interconnected spaces that nonetheless possess unique characters that appealed to different groups of residents and shoppers. 86 City officials had to allow for the sort of development that led to appealing spaces for those interested in an urban-type experience but also maintain the sense of small-town quaintness in the traditional downtown that would serve as a counterbalance, particularly for those who were prone to push back if they thought that big retail was monopolizing downtown’s small-town character and driving up rents that would displace local merchants.
When the city released its newest version of its general plan in 2006, it was clear that the focus on pedestrian-oriented retail rested on a new emphasis: a careful balance between big retail and the traditional small-town environments. 87 Previous plans had succeeded in smoothing over the boundaries between Broadway Plaza and the rest of downtown, but new policies outlined ways in which to retain a specific character in each area, with a particular emphasis on buttressing the sense of character in the traditional downtown in the face of big retail’s expanding spatial holdings. Planning details reveal an interest in diversifying the corporate patina of the Broadway Plaza area while holding the quaint character of the traditional downtown steady; mixed-use developments of higher density are encouraged in the latter, while development in the former is geared exclusively to small-scale retail that either preserves or enhances the downtown pedestrian experience. 88
Still, further additions to Broadway Plaza were largely welcomed during the turbulence of the 2008 recession. When Macerich successfully courted Dallas-based department store Neiman Marcus—a retailer associated with the highest echelon of urbane luxury—to build their forty-second store at the corner of Main Street and Mount Diablo Boulevard to serve as the center’s third anchor, a political drama played out in which civic support and outside developer opposition revealed the acknowledged strength of Walnut Creek’s retail prowess. 89 When a developer planning a new retail center in nearby San Ramon learned of Walnut Creek’s plans to welcome the Bay Area’s third Neiman Marcus store, they canvassed the city’s NIMBY-minded residents to oppose the new development on the grounds of increased traffic and zoning violations. 90 A sufficient number of signatures by opponents saw that a measure ended up on the ballot, but when 71 percent of eligible voters approved the measure allowing the construction of the 90,000 square-foot store, it was clear that continued retail development had the hearty support of the community. 91
More upmarket additions in the years after the Neiman Marcus decision brought even more premium retailers to Walnut Creek that were not among the typical shopping center mix, and the elevated vacancy rate brought on by the 2008 downturn—comparatively low compared with respect to other municipalities—rebounded swiftly. 92 Complaints about this development were minimal. In an era where the fiscal health of suburban communities seemed all the more tenuous, particularly in California, Walnut Creek officials and residents saw retail as not only desirable but indispensable insulation from economic turbulence. 93
If the Neiman Marcus project seemed like a major alteration to Broadway Plaza, what Macerich proposed in 2012 promised to be exponentially more significant—a complete overhaul that would increase the size of the 636,000 square-foot center to allow for a fourth anchor and more shops, redesign its outdoor spaces, and update aging parking decks, all in an effort to attract even more shoppers and high-end tenants. Negotiations were ongoing, with Macerich expressing interests from closing off the central thoroughfare (also called Broadway Plaza) of the mall completely to traffic, building an underground garage, and constructing some two hundred housing units. 94 Initial pushback from the city—intent on allowing for growth without major spatial alterations that would compromise the sense of connectivity between downtown and the mall—led to a more sedate, yet still ambitious plan, and in December 2013, with notably little opposition from citizens, the City Council unanimously approved the addition of 300,000 square feet of retail space and the redevelopment and demolition of another 200,000 square feet or retail and garage space. 95 The terms and costs of the project are impressive: the complete build of the US$250,000,000 makeover will take some twenty years. In return, Macerich agreed to pay the city US$5 million for use as the City Council sees fit. 96
Conclusion
Walnut Creek’s long road to retail dominance was far from linear. When city planners first organized their vision around the success and geographic position of Broadway Shopping Center in the 1950s, little did they know that the forces shaping suburban retail space would change so drastically in the ensuing decades. Nor did they foresee that nonretail dynamics like commercial office development would have such a complicated and indirect impact on the viability of their unique retail environment. The city’s early planners certainly understood the importance of galvanizing their own municipality in the spirit of competitiveness, but the ways in which struggles over retail space unfolded over the years underscore the ways in which shopping space became an increasingly multifunctional asset for the city, as well as a tool through which planners could exercise an increased amount of influence as they gained more autonomy. More than a site of intense commercial activity, Broadway Shopping Center became the planners’ crucible for the distillation of municipal identity and well-being, and a bargaining chip of sorts for the navigation of suburban change.
This retail history sheds new light on the role of planners within the development of suburbs. Critical geographies of retail and suburbanization have often assumed many municipal planners to sit the realm of the growth coalition, an alliance that often privileged the benefits of tax revenue and developer satisfaction over other elements of civic health. 97 Yet Walnut Creek’s history reveals this association to have its limits. While the city’s planners were doubtless concerned with fiscal health and good relations with a successful developer that had helped turn their retail fortunes around, they were equally concerned with defending a certain vision of suburban space that did not necessarily concede to all of the developer’s wishes. Retail came to reside in a matrix of forces and demands whose logic was one of constant negotiation, with the decisions and actions of planners becoming increasingly fine-tuned as time went on.
Walnut Creek’s retail odyssey also underscores the ways in which suburban landscapes became increasingly complicated in terms of aesthetic, geographic, and economic dynamics—a reality that pushes back against clichéd visions of suburbs as landscapes of static conformity. While developers built Broadway Shopping Center with profit as their primary goal, their project grew into a space that would perpetuate a wide-ranging set of challenges for city planners whose position shifted over the decades. In addition to considerations of inter-suburban competition and landscape diversification that unfolded as municipalities grew and matured, planners had to grapple with more fine-grained notions of space and aesthetics as the tastes in suburban retail environments evolved. When planners honed their plans around Broadway Shopping Center in the 1950s, the spaces they were dealing with were just coming into their own as quintessential suburban locales. But by the latter decades of the century, big changes in demographics, tastes, and metropolitan dynamics saw the now iconic signifiers of the 1950s suburban retail landscape—ample parking, shaded walkways, and sense of architectural and spatial order that conveyed a sense of removal from the urban core—give way to a broader assortment of features that alluded to the urban core as much as they did the periphery.
These changes in environmental standards, particularly during the 1990s, underscore the difficulties that planners faced in confronting the diversification of suburban landscapes. Walnut Creek’s residents might have shunned the edge-city buildup for its replication of perceived urban ills—namely, densification and traffic congestion—but they largely embraced the buildup of big retail and a sense of urbane life in their downtown. This contradiction reveals the unique position that retail space had come to hold within certain municipalities that blended suburban living with certain amenities perceived to be urban. In their ability to accommodate a leisurely and collective activity connected with notions of both big city streets and small-town marketplaces, retail spaces fulfilled the requirement of harboring paradoxical notions of metropolitan life. More acutely than most places, downtown Walnut Creek highlights this strange duality of balancing small-town and big city vibes, which became a key task for suburban planners engaged in honing their municipal landscapes for more specific and paradoxical tastes.
Most broadly, the case of Walnut Creek’s retail space epitomizes the strong forces of change and adaptation that characterize the late twentieth-century suburban landscape—a reality that a long history of antisuburban rhetoric has done much to obscure. While certain elements of the story—NIMBYism and a tendency toward architectural traditionalism—adhere to a gospel of stability, the prevailing theme is one of long-term change. In this respect, Walnut Creek reveals one way in which a suburban landscape and its shapers have accommodated a key paradox of metropolitan life: an embrace of change with an appearance of stability. This sort of paradox—so apparent in many successful postwar retail developments—reflects for architectural historian John Archer the undeniable truth that suburbs are landscapes of constant flux. While formulaic in many ways, he writes, they function as “a complex mosaic of places where people do their best to work out responses to the conflicting claims and opportunities that our culture … presents.” 98
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments are due to Margaret Crawford for her early comments on this article. For other kinds of assistance, they are also due to Priscilla Couden of the Contra Costa County Historical Society, Scott Parsons, Leigh Poitinger of the San Jose Mercury News, Monica Singh of the Long Business Library at UC, Berkeley, and most especially to Sheila and Judd Rogstad of the Walnut Creek Historical Society.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.