The Woodlands Edition | October 2023

Community

BY VANESSA HOLT

The Woodlands villages developed for convenience, mobility

Editor's note: This story is part of a monthly series that Community Impact will run through the 50th anniversary of The Woodlands in October 2024 highlighting the community.

The contours of the villages in The Woodlands are not random occurrences, but deliberate choices made as part of the design of the community, said Robert Heineman, retired vice president of planning and design for The Woodlands developer Howard Hughes. The process that led to the 1974 opening of The Woodlands considered elements such as topogra- phy and mobility to create villages with a blend of services and amenities in an aesthetically pleasing environment, he said. The design of The Woodlands began with George Mitchell, who began purchasing land in 1964 that had previously housed the Grogan Cochran Lumber Company. The rst piece of The Woodlands was 2,800 acres, but a total of 17,455 acres were purchased by the time communities began to open in 1974. Heineman worked alongside Mitchell and other community founders since the 1970s. He said the idea was to have a downtown area surrounded by villages. “The basic concept of the village center was that you have a supermarket-anchored center that is supported by the surrounding residential popula- tion and that you augment the supermarket with other services,” Heineman said. The details While the sizes of the various villages vary, the main idea was to concentrate retail development in one area along with other high-density housing such as apartments. Lower-density uses as well as areas such as golf courses and parks are further out and closer to the ood plain, where fewer paved areas are more desirable, he said. The east-west corridors running through The Woodlands—such as Research Forest Drive, Lake Woodlands Drive and Woodlands Parkway—occur at 2-mile intervals, which diers from an urban structure where major thoroughfares are spaced 1 mile apart, Heineman said. However, by

Panther Creek Village Center in The Woodlands opened in 1977.

COURTESY HOWARD HUGHES

Village openings The Woodlands’ villages and the years they opened are:

Anatomy of a village The original village idea included a retail center surrounded by residences.

Grogan's Mill

1974

Parks

Residential

Village center

Panther Creek

1977

Cochran's Crossing

1983

Indian Springs

1983

Alden Bridge

1994

G H F A R E

Sterling Ridge

1999

Carlton Woods

2000

College Park

2001

Creekside Park

2007

placing the thoroughfares along topographical contours and concentrating retail development in higher-density areas, trac is moved away from residential areas. “The boundaries of the villages were set ultimately by the [natural] boundaries of The Woodlands, the nature of thoroughfare or the ood plain,” Heineman said. “Each village is a little dierent in size and population.”

One more thing The most recent village opened in The

Woodlands, Creekside Park—which is in Harris County—has one element Heineman said he would have planned for every village in hindsight. “I would put in a village green in every village,” he said. “The innovative idea back then was to take Kuykendahl Road and to split it into a north and south road, which make access into the supermarket a little bit easier.”

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