Victoria Gardens Lifestyle Center

The retail mix at Victoria Gardens is one of the most substantial in the central Inland Empire. The principal anchor stores include Macy's (the substantial department store), JCPenney (the second department-store anchor), Bass Pro Shops (the substantial outdoor-sporting-goods anchor that draws regional traffic well beyond the immediate area), and AMC Theaters (the 12-screen movie complex). The Apple Store, the Disney Store, the Sephora cosmetics emporium, and the Old Navy are the principal national specialty tenants.

Beyond the anchors, the specialty retail covers the standard mall-tenant categories — women's clothing (the full range from H&M and Forever 21 through Anthropologie and J.Crew through the higher-end White House Black Market), men's clothing, children's clothing, accessories and shoes, beauty and cosmetics, electronics, books (Barnes & Noble), home goods, sporting goods, and the various specialty categories. The mix is well-curated for the Inland Empire demographic and supports both casual browsing and serious shopping trips.

Local and regional businesses are more substantially represented than typical of equivalent suburban shopping centers. Several local restaurant operations, a few regional specialty retailers, and the kind of curated mix that brings the center closer to a genuine downtown commercial district than to an enclosed-mall shopping experience. The result is a more diverse retail mix that supports longer visits and broader patronage than would be possible with a purely national-chain tenant lineup.

The dining mix at Victoria Gardens is substantially more diverse and higher-quality than typical mall food courts. Quick-casual chains include the standard lineup (Chipotle, Panera, Five Guys, Habit Burger, Cheesecake Factory) appropriate for shopping-trip lunches and casual family dinners. The full-service upscale restaurants include Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar, Yard House, BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse, Lucille's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que, Bonefish Grill, and several others that support genuine dinner destinations rather than just shopping-trip fuel.

Asian cuisines are well-represented through PF Chang's (Chinese-American), Tomikawa Japanese (sushi and Japanese), and several other Asian-focused operations. Mexican cuisine includes the Inland Empire's substantial Mexican-American tradition through several restaurants. Italian, American, seafood, and barbecue cuisines all have substantial representations. The dining mix supports breakfast (at the cafes that open early), lunch (substantial options across all price points), and dinner (the full-service restaurants that operate into the evening).

The restaurants combined with the outdoor streetscape, the central plaza fountains, and the evening lighting create the kind of dinner-and-strolling atmosphere that supports the lifestyle-center concept's central premise. Many Inland Empire families use Victoria Gardens as a regular weekly outing — dinner at one of the restaurants, walking the streetscape, perhaps a movie at the AMC, and the kind of relaxed family time that the open-air pedestrian environment supports better than enclosed malls. Free parking throughout, with parking structures supplementing the surface lots.

The Victoria Gardens Cultural Center is the substantial municipal-arts component of the development — a 60,000-square-foot facility that opened in 2006 and integrates with the surrounding retail and dining environment to create a more substantial entertainment district than retail alone could support. The Cultural Center contains the Lewis Family Playhouse (a 536-seat performance theater that hosts the kind of regional theater, music, dance, and children's programming that supports community cultural life), the Paul A. Biane Library (the City of Rancho Cucamonga's principal library branch), and various event and meeting spaces.

The Lewis Family Playhouse programming includes regional touring productions, local theater company performances, music series across multiple genres, family-friendly programming, and the kind of community-event scheduling that supports cultural life across the central Inland Empire. The annual programming calendar typically includes 50-100 events ranging from substantial touring productions to local community programming. The Biane Library is a substantial contemporary public library serving the city; the children's programming is particularly strong.

Outdoor events through the central plaza and surrounding streetscape supplement the Cultural Center programming throughout the year. The summer concert series, the holiday-season events, the various seasonal celebrations, and the kind of community programming that lifestyle centers increasingly host all contribute to the broader sense of place. The result is a destination that genuinely combines shopping, dining, entertainment, and cultural programming in a way that the older enclosed-mall format could not.