Town Center, Columbia, Maryland

Town Center Downtown Columbia
Village
Columbia Town Center
Intersection of Broken Land Parkway and Town Center Avenue
Downtown Columbia featuring the Town Center and the Villages of Wilde Lake and Harper's Choice.
Country	United States
State	Maryland
City	Columbia
Established	1974
Founded by	James Rouse
Named for	Columbia's city center
Website	[1]

Town Center is one of the ten villages in Columbia, Maryland, United States, first occupied in 1974. It is a non-contiguous, diverse area, and the most urban-like, ranging from multi-level high density apartments homes and office buildings, to single family homes.

The six residential neighborhoods in the village include Amesbury Hill, Banneker, Creighton’s Run, Lakefront, Vantage Point, and Warfield Triangle.

The town center is constructed on the grounds of Oakland Manor, a former slave plantation. Construction started in 1966, with sidewalks linking major amenities added in 1984.

Columbia Exhibit Center is the facility built to market the project to visitors. The building was designed by the firm of Gehry, Walsh and O'Malley. The site hosted 215,000 in its first year.

Vantage Point is in the tract patented by John Dorsey as Dorsey's Adventure in 1688. The name comes from a poem by Robert Frost, and the street names are from Frost and William Cullen Bryant. It contains a house, Historic Oakland, built in 1811 by Charles Sterrett Ridgely. The Town Center village offices are in Historic Oakland. Oliver's Carriage House, a stable built by Robert Oliver, is on the grounds and is currently home to Kittamaqundi Community, a non-denominational religious congregation.

Amesbury Hill was originally set aside as an estate area for Rouse Company executives and was part of the Mercer Tract. Mercer Tract was owned by the parents of Lucy Mercer, the personal secretary to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.Creighton's Run, developed in 1979, was named for the boss of the construction company.

Banneker was first occupied in 1992, named for Banneker Road. The road was named for Benjamin Banneker.

Vantage House is a 13-story Life Care Retirement Community built in place of an 18th-century historical residence and opened in October 1990.

The Town Center is also referred to as "Downtown Columbia" due to its central location within Columbia, as well as the new urbanism-style redevelopment project under construction since 2010. The new development also created four new distinct neighborhood areas: