Whizin Market Square Is Finally Turning to Face Its Own Backyard

Walk the driveway into Whizin Market Square off Roadside Drive this month and the center looks the same way it has for years: the steeple-shaped clocktower over the atrium, Wood Ranch smoking away on one end, Basta's patio full at lunch. But walk south, past the last row of parking, and the ground has changed underneath you. What used to be an open concrete drainage channel running along Agoura Road is now a landscaped strip with a path, native plants, and enough width for a horse. That strip has a name now: the Ladyface Greenway. It had its ribbon cutting on August 19, and it is the reason Whizin is about to do something it has never done in seventy years of operating on this corner. It's going to build a second front door.

That is the story here, and it is easy to miss if you only clock the individual updates. A park opened. An apartment building is going up across the street. A shopping center is talking about new storefronts. Treated separately, those are three small items. Treated together, they describe a 1954 roadside strip being pushed to face a direction it was never built to face.

The Channel That Became a Park

The Ladyface Greenway runs along Agoura Road from the Whizin driveway to Cornell Road, on land that used to be exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to find at the edge of a strip mall: a runoff channel, chain link, nothing to look at. The city's project capped that channel and turned it into more than an acre of public space, with paths built for pedestrians, cyclists, and equestrians. At the ribbon cutting, two riders on horseback tested the new trail while officials spoke about what it took to get there. Mayor Jeremy Wolf called it a vision that had been in the works for more than a decade, through years of scoping, environmental review, and funding fights. Public Works Director Charmaine Yambao put it more simply: a labor of love for the staff who saw it through.

None of that is unusual for a municipal park project. Cities cap channels and add trails all the time, and most of those trails don't change anything for the businesses next door. What makes this one different is where it sits. It doesn't run through a neighborhood or along a creek somewhere in Old Agoura. It runs directly along the property line of the city's busiest privately owned shopping center, and it puts foot traffic, for the first time, on the one side of Whizin that has never had a storefront.

Why the Owner Is Suddenly Talking About Doors

Bill Tucker has owned Whizin since 2006, through the Calabasas-based Tucker Investment Group, and he has been candid about what he thinks the center is good at. He describes his approach as building pedestrian-friendly environments, the kind of place where a visitor can walk a defined area and find, in his words, nooks and crannies. That description has always applied to Whizin's interior, the boutique tenant mix tucked around the atrium. It has never applied to the center's south edge, because there was nothing back there to walk toward.

The greenway changes that math. Tucker has told local reporters he is working on plans to cut new storefronts into the south side of the center, giving some tenants direct access to the park so they can catch people walking the new trail instead of only people pulling into the parking lot off Roadside Drive. As of the most recent reporting, no shovel has gone into the ground. The project is still moving through entitlements and building permits, and Tucker had hoped to have it ready for the park's opening, a timeline that slipped once the permitting stretched longer than expected.

That detail matters more than it looks like on the surface. A shopping center built entirely around a parking lot and a driveway is now retrofitting a second face onto itself because the ground behind it changed use. That is not a cosmetic update. It is a structural one, and it is happening in real time, one permit application at a time, right now.

The Building Rising on the Other Side of the Street

Whizin isn't only reacting to what's happening behind it. Directly across Agoura Road, at the corner with Cornell Road, a four-story apartment building called the Regency Center is under construction on the site of the city's last movie theater. The project will bring 278 new units to the block, with occupancy expected in August 2027. The ground floor includes 1,000 square feet of commercial space slated for a coffee shop, and the former FedEx building on the same parcel is expected to hold two more restaurants once the project wraps.

Put the two projects on the same timeline and the picture gets clearer. In the space of about a year, Whizin will have gained a landscaped park on one flank and several hundred new residents within a short walk on the other. Tucker has said he isn't worried about the apartments pulling attention away from his center. He sees it as an expansion of what Whizin already does, calling Agoura Road a corridor that could become more of a downtown for the city as a whole. Whether that holds up once the building leases up is still an open question, but the logic of the moment is straightforward: more people are about to be within walking distance of a center that, until this year, was built almost entirely around people arriving by car.

What Hasn't Changed, and What Has

None of this is happening to a blank slate. Whizin's clocktower, the steeple-shaped landmark that anchors the atrium, was built in 1973, replacing an old supermarket on the same footprint. The center itself traces back to 1954, when Art Whizin bought the land along what was then Route 101 and opened a twelve-stool hamburger stand with a four-pump gas station, adding a rodeo arena that later became a dirt motorcycle track before any of the current tenants existed. The clocktower and the atrium layout are the version of Whizin most residents know today, but the site has already reinvented itself more than once.

The current lineup inside includes Wood Ranch BBQ & Grill, Basta, Sunrose California Eatery, Plata Cocina Mexicana, Two Doughs, and The Canyon, the live music venue that has kept a packed calendar of tribute acts and touring performers running most weeknights through the fall. If you're looking for something newer on the broader Agoura Hills dining map, Howdy's opened earlier this year with a Mexican and Japanese menu, its second location after an original spot in Malibu, though that one sits elsewhere in town rather than inside Whizin itself. The point isn't that every restaurant in Agoura Hills is tied to this one corner. It's that the corner itself, the oldest commercial ground in the city, is the one absorbing the most structural change this year.

A 70-Year-Old Corner Learns a New Direction

Most updates to a shopping center are additive: a new tenant fills an empty space, a facade gets refreshed, nothing about the building's basic shape changes. What's happening at Whizin is different. The center is being asked to face two directions at once, the Roadside Drive side it was built around and a south side it's only now learning it has, because the ground on that side stopped being a drainage ditch and became a park. The apartments across the street add a second reason to make that pivot permanent.

If you live near Whizin, the next year is worth watching closely, not because a restaurant opened or a ribbon got cut, but because the shape of the place is genuinely changing. The permits for those new storefronts haven't cleared yet. The Regency Center won't be ready for tenants until 2027. But the direction is set, and it's a rare thing to watch a seventy-year-old commercial corner decide, in the space of a single construction season, which way it actually wants to face.

If you're thinking about what a changing corner like this means for property values, timing, or your own next move in Agoura Hills, The Malibu Life knows this stretch of the Conejo Valley from the ground up. Work With Us.