By Jonathan Friedman
Associate Editor

September 18, 2014 -- When planning began for Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade more than 25 years ago, there were few successful outdoor pedestrian malls in the United States from which to draw inspiration.

In fact, the outdoor mall had proven to be a failure in cities across the country, including the future site of the Promenade. By the 1980s, the general opinion among urban planners was that the indoor mall was the only workable model.

“That was a period when shopping malls were all cookie cutter types, and they were all enclosed,” says John Jalili, who was City Manager during the planning and birth of the Promenade. “They didn’t quite relate to their surroundings. They looked like a box.”

One of the few successful outdoor malls was in Boulder, Colorado, but it had the advantage of being next to a university, which was not the case with the Promenade. The lack of good examples meant City officials and their partners had to create the model.

“The idea was to make it feel more like a street that has been closed, rather than trying to make it look like all of it was one giant sidewalk that is empty,” recalls Boris Dramov, whose firm Roma Design was in charge of the makeover.

“You have an actual sidewalk space where people can walk, and then in the center space there could be carts and other kinds of activities that happen,” Dramov says. “There was a very strong emphasis placed through planning on encouraging mixed-use development.”

The result, unveiled on September 16, 1989, would inspire not only other outdoor pedestrian malls, but what former Mayor Denny Zane calls “new-urbanist smart growth planning.”

Ed McMahon, a senior fellow for sustainable development with the Washington D.C.-based Urban Land Institute, estimates that nearly one-third of the malls in the U.S. have been “torn down and turned inside out” in an effort to try and, at least in part, replicate the Promenade.

“The Promenade has been a model, and many people have emulated it,” McMahon says. “And it has been extraordinarily successful from an economic standpoint. It sort of set the stage for more walking kind of places.”

Today, there are numerous examples of pedestrian malls influenced by the Promenade, says Woodie Tescher, who as director of planning at Envicom Corp. was the lead planner for the Promenade.

One example is Victoria Gardens, which opened 10 years ago in Rancho Cucamonga.

“While it’s not quite like the Promenade, it doesn’t look like a traditional mall at all,” Tescher says. “It’s got a series of walkable blocks, retail uses located directly up to the street frontage and public spaces for outdoor entertainment. It’s got a lot of the ingredients the Promenade has.”

Zane notes that the Promenade’s development coincided with the introduction of Old Town Pasadena. Although the two shopping districts have their differences, they also share several features, including the adaptive re-use of buildings.

“They both came into rebirth at about the same time, with roughly the same success,” Zane says. “I would say the two projects together, rather than just one by itself, had a profound effect on Southern California and, in particular, on what it might take to make a Downtown area work.”

The two projects, he says, were early models of what would become “smart growth and new urbanism,” a development philosophy that emphasizes mixed-use projects and adaptive re-use in compact environments. Residents living Downtown drive less, he notes, which is good for the environment.

“When we started (working on the Promenade), there were zero mixed-use projects in Los Angeles County,” recalls Zane, founder and executive director of Move LA, a non-profit that advocates to increase funding for public transit.

“We were the first, and the barriers were formidable because the building codes were all specialized for residential or commercial,” he recalls. “And finance was specialized. We had to figure out how to combine them, and these things started to work out.”

The success of the Promenade and Old Town Pasadena led the Southern California Association of Governments, (SCAG) to create the Livable Cities Project to promote economic development based on the Santa Monica and Pasadena models.

Several Southern California communities, Zane says, have followed the Promenade model for their revitalization programs, including Monrovia, San Gabriel Valley, Alhambra, Long Beach and Burbank.

“Many people have told me that what happened in Santa Monica and Pasadena jump-started this new wave,” Zane says. “And the new urbanist smart growth model is probably the most dominant model in urban development in America.”