Mission Viejo: the story of a planned city

At the start of the tour

Welcome to Mission Viejo

Welcome to Mission Viejo. I'm your guide for this tour, and we'll take it one stop at a time.

Sixty years ago there was no city here. This was ranch country, the northern part of Rancho Mission Viejo, run by the O'Neill family. In 1963, Donald Bren, Philip Reilly and James Toepfer bought that northern land and formed the Mission Viejo Company. They were planning more than housing: schools, recreation, shops and services that would make a town. We'll follow that thread in reverse, from the institutions serving the community back to the landscape and its city government.

The plan set aside land for homes, schools, churches, shops and parks, including roughly three thousand acres of parks and open space. It put the roads in the valleys and the homes on the hills, following the land instead of laying down a grid. That's why the streets here curve, and why two places that look close on a map can feel far apart by car.

The company even designed a streetlight: a lamp shaped like a mission bell. The city credits Donald Bren with creating it in 1964.

The first families moved in in 1966, and the places we'll visit arrived with them: the college and the hospital, the swim club that went to the Olympics, the lake the city built for itself, and the creek it grew up around. We'll finish at the Civic Center, with the last piece of the story: how this planned community finally became a city. Our first stop is Saddleback College.

Point 1 · At the stop

Welcome: Saddleback College

This is Saddleback College. It's a campus spread across its site rather than one building with a front door: access roads and parking at the edges, and paths linking teaching spaces, student services, the library and athletic facilities inside.

The college is older than most of the city around it. It opened in 1968 in portable buildings, on the site that later became Mission Hospital, and this permanent campus was dedicated in 1970, while the neighborhoods were still being built.

The name comes from the landscape. Saddleback is the saddle-shaped dip between Santiago Peak and Modjeska Peak in the Cleveland National Forest.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Crown Valley: the mall and the hospital

Next, we're heading to Crown Valley, to the mall and Mission Hospital.

The college and hospital share a beginning: the hospital site first held the college’s portable classrooms. Medical care became another essential service for the growing community. The hospital came before the mall. Mission Hospital opened on August eleventh, 1971, with a hundred and twenty-four beds, three hundred and thirty staff and forty-one physicians. From the start it offered emergency care, surgery, intensive care, obstetrics and pediatrics. A cardiac center followed in 2002, and an acute-care tower in 2009.

The shopping came later. Mission Viejo Mall opened in 1979 with four department-store anchors: Bullock's, Robinson's, Montgomery Ward and May Company. A major renovation and expansion in 1999 renamed it The Shops at Mission Viejo.

Point 2 · At the stop

Crown Valley: the mall and the hospital

This is Crown Valley, with The Shops at Mission Viejo and Mission Hospital side by side. The mall was built to draw people from well beyond one neighborhood, and you can read that from here: long building fronts, wide access lanes and a great deal of parking.

And the hospital stands on the very ground where Saddleback College got its start, in portable buildings, in 1968. Shopping, medicine and education have all passed through this one corner of the city.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Florence Joyner Olympiad Park

Next, we're heading to Florence Joyner Olympiad Park. We move from the institutions serving everyday needs to the city's sporting identity. Schools and recreation were part of that same plan, and sometimes they produced achievements far beyond the neighborhood.

Mission Viejo High School opened in 1966, the same year the first families moved in, on a fifty-five-acre site. It's part of the Saddleback Valley Unified School District, its attendance area reaches beyond the city into parts of Lake Forest, Trabuco Canyon, Rancho Santa Margarita and Laguna Hills, and it has been an International Baccalaureate school since 1985. Its campus even includes one of the only agricultural farms at a high school in the district, and one of its graduates, Julie Foudy, won Olympic gold in soccer in 1996.

Golf came early, too. The Mission Viejo Country Club course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, welcomed its first foursome in 1967. It was so difficult that people nicknamed it Mission Impossible. The club was renovated in 1975, and again in 2010.

The park brings that sporting story to one remarkable resident.

Florence Griffith was born in Los Angeles in 1959 and grew up partly in the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts. At UCLA she trained under coach Bob Kersee, and at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles she took silver in the two hundred meters.

Then came 1988. At the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, she ran the hundred meters in ten point four nine seconds, a world record. In Seoul that fall she won gold in the hundred, the two hundred and the four-by-one-hundred relay, plus silver in the four-by-four-hundred. She set world records in both individual events that year. The world knew her as Flo-Jo: the colorful outfits she designed herself, the trademark fingernails, and the "one-legger," a running suit with one leg full length and the other cut off.

She retired in 1989, co-chaired the President's Council on Physical Fitness in the nineties, and even designed uniforms for the Indiana Pacers. She lived here in Mission Viejo with her husband, Al Joyner, the 1984 Olympic triple-jump champion. She died at home, in the Canyon Crest neighborhood, in September 1998, at thirty-eight, after a severe epileptic seizure. Two years later, the city dedicated this park in her name.

Point 3 · At the stop

Florence Joyner Olympiad Park

This is Florence Joyner Olympiad Park, both a memorial and an everyday neighborhood park. Its designers gave it two moods: open playing fields and playgrounds for active use, and smaller, tree-lined gardens for quieter time.

Among the gardens is a bronze statue of her crossing the line in the Seoul hundred meters. You may not see it from the car, but it sets the tone for the whole place: a champion remembered in a park full of kids running.

It honors athletic achievement, and it's also simply a park, a place where another generation can play.

That is the connection to the wider tour: recreation can produce a world-famous champion, but its everyday purpose is still to give people somewhere to be active together.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Lake Mission Viejo

Next, we're heading to Lake Mission Viejo, and the shops and restaurants along its shore.

The park’s Olympic theme is one part of recreation here. The lake represents another: a landscape built for residents’ everyday leisure. Even the water was part of the master plan. The lake itself was a construction project. Work began in the 1970s with a basin and an earthen dam at the southern end. The basin was finished in 1976 and took until 1978 to fill, making about a hundred and twenty-four acres of water. The Mission Viejo Company dedicated it to a residents' association in 1977, and it opened to members in June 1978. It has never been a public lake: the beaches, boating and fishing belong to the association's members and their guests.

A built lake needs constant care. As water evaporates, it leaves dissolved salts behind, so topping it up isn't enough; its chemistry has to be managed too, and the association has used advanced purified water to do it. Runoff from the surrounding streets and lawns doesn't go into the lake at all. Storm drains carry it away to protect the water.

The plan built different kinds of neighborhoods around amenities like this one. Casta del Sol, a gated retirement community, opened its private recreation center in 1973, and its golf course opened to the public a year later.

The city's Olympic story also reached beyond the pool. In 1984, Mission Viejo hosted both the men's and women's Olympic cycling road races. The start and finish line, with its grandstands, was on Olympiad Road, just outside the lake's entrance; the road used to be called O'Neill Road and was renamed for the race. The course looped up through the homes near Crucero Park, down Marguerite to La Paz, and back up Olympiad. In 2004, for the twentieth anniversary, the city dedicated a permanent start and finish line there, with historic markers.

Point 4 · At the stop

Lake Mission Viejo

This is Market on the Lake, where a row of shops and restaurants and a broad sheet of water share the same shoreline. Between the buildings, you can see how the hills and houses frame the lake.

Two of the restaurants here sit right on the water. Yama Sushi, a longtime local favorite, serves fish brought in from around the world with a view across the lake, and Orange County Register readers named it the best sushi in the county. In the same row, Domenico's on the Lake opened in 2021 in the space Peppino's used to fill. The Domenico's name goes back to a pizza place that opened in Long Beach in 1954, and the Mission Viejo Chamber of Commerce named it its 2025 Restaurant of the Year. Lake members can tie up at the dock here and walk up to eat.

The shops give this planned recreational landscape another use. Eating beside the water is one part of the shoreline; the association's beaches and boating are another, with different access rules.

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History, on the way there

On the way: The Nadadores pool

Next, we're heading to the Marguerite Aquatics Complex, home of the Mission Viejo Nadadores. The name is Spanish for swimmers. The lake and the pool show different sides of the city’s recreational ambition. The lake offered residents leisure; the club turned local training into international competition. Both grew from a plan that put recreation alongside housing.

The club started in December 1968, organized by the Mission Viejo Company, with a few dozen young swimmers. By 1970 there were about a hundred and twenty. In 1972 the Marguerite complex added a fifty-meter competition pool and a warm-up pool, and a young coach named Mark Schubert arrived. Three years later he was named Coach of the Year, at twenty-six.

Then the results came. In 1976, six of the club's swimmers went to the Montreal Olympics: Shirley Babashoff, Brian Goodell, Maryanne Graham, Nicole Kramer, Casey Converse and Marcia Morey. Babashoff and Goodell came home with seven medals between them, the first Olympic medals for anyone from Mission Viejo. Diving platforms were added at Marguerite in 1977, and one of the club's divers was Greg Louganis, who went on to win four Olympic gold medals. He and four teammates made the 1980 Olympic diving team, then missed Moscow because of the American boycott; they competed in China and Japan instead. At the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, the team's swimmers and divers won thirteen medals, ten of them gold, with medalists including Louganis, Tiffany Cohen, Michele Mitchell, Wendy Wyland and Dara Torres. And in 1996, the club's Lisa Jacob won two more golds in Atlanta.

Under Schubert, from 1972 to 1985, the club won forty-four national team titles, and it has sent athletes to every Olympic Games since 1976. Not bad for a neighborhood swim team in a brand-new suburb.

Point 5 · At the stop

The Nadadores pool

This is the Marguerite Aquatics Complex, the Nadadores' home pool. The thing to look for is the diving tower: a stack of training platforms at different heights, rising above the pool deck and giving the complex an outline no neighborhood pool has.

Around the water are shade structures and spectator seating. The tower came with a major renovation, when the old pools were stripped back to their concrete shells and rebuilt for a new generation of swimmers and divers.

Diving here goes back to 1977, when the first platforms went up. The club still calls this place home, so whether or not anyone is in the water today, these are the pools where Olympic medalists learned their craft.

The training history now has a physical shape: competition water below, platforms above, and space around the edges for families and spectators. The international results began in a place built for local recreation.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Oso Creek: the trailhead

Next, we're heading to Oso Creek. Alongside the constructed lake and pools, the creek is a reminder of the landscape that came first. Development changed this existing watercourse, and recreation found another form along its banks. Oso is Spanish for bear. The name probably came from the Spanish, though nobody knows for sure who gave it.

Until the 1970s, this creek was ephemeral: it ran after rain and sat dry much of the year. Then the houses came. Runoff from lawns and streets across the watershed gave it a steady, year-round trickle, and long stretches were lined with concrete and rock to carry it safely through the city.

So the creek does two jobs now. It carries the water the city sends it. And it's the backbone of the trail system: the Oso Creek Trail follows much of it, mostly along a fire road, and a link finished in 2003, from the Potocki Center to Pavion Park, joined separate pieces of open space into one route. The city has also replanted its banks with streamside plants, so the corridor works as habitat for wildlife, not just landscaping.

Point 6 · At the stop

Oso Creek: the trailhead

This is the Oso Creek trailhead parking on Marguerite Parkway. The narrow belt of trees beside the parking spaces is the creek corridor. The water is usually hidden below the banks, but the line of green gives it away.

Oso Creek runs about thirteen and a half miles in all. Through this part of Mission Viejo it flows in a narrow strip of streamside trees with neighborhoods pressed close on either side, which is why it's so easy to drive past without noticing.

The trail follows that strip, linking parts of the city by a different route than the roads: a continuous line of green that gives water, wildlife and people their own way through town.

That contrast between pavement and greenery brings the creek's two roles together: drainage for the developed city, and a connected strip of habitat and recreation.

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History, on the way there

On the way: The Civic Center

Next, we're heading to the Civic Center, the last stop on the tour, and the last piece of the story.

For its first twenty-two years, Mission Viejo was a community without a city government. The first families arrived in 1966, but the town remained an unincorporated part of Orange County, with the county providing many of its services. Over time, residents wanted local control. The question of cityhood went on the ballot, voters approved it overwhelmingly in 1987, and Mission Viejo became a city on March thirty-first, 1988.

It started as a contract city. Instead of building every department itself, it contracted for services, and that's still how it works today: its police come from the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

The homes, the schools, the pools and the lake came first. City government came last, and so did its buildings.

Point 7 · At the stop

The Civic Center: the end of the tour

This is the Civic Center: the library along one side, City Hall along the other, and a walk of tall palms between them. The patrol cars out front belong to the city's police services station, which shares City Hall's address.

The two buildings arrived in an unusual order. The city bought this corner of La Paz and Marguerite in 1993, and the library opened first, in October 1997: a long, low building under a broad roof, with walls of rough, layered stone. Residents voted in 2000 to build City Hall on the land next door, and it was dedicated in March 2002, the same spring the library's expansion opened.

Think back over the stops: a college, a hospital and a mall, a park named for a champion, a lake, the Nadadores' pools, a creek corridor, and now a library and City Hall. The creek and the hills were here long before the development. The buildings and institutions came in stages, then generations of residents gave them their purpose. That is how a master plan became a lived-in city.

Thanks for taking the tour with me. The tour is complete.

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