By LONA O'CONNOR
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

A yellow helicopter hovers overhead. Mike Friedman looks skyward.

"They're taking pictures of the site almost every day now," he says, smiling.

Friedman, president of GL Commercial, is walking across the bustling, dusty site of the Canyon Town Center, the big new shopping-civic complex rapidly rising on the corner of Boynton Beach Boulevard and Lyons Road.

Major construction on the town center should be done by the end of this year, when its current population of hard hats will be replaced by residents of the nearly 30,000 homes within 5 miles, with more on the drawing boards.  Though it looks like a 200,000-square-foot shopping complex — and it is — the town center is also taking its name seriously.

Plans include sports fields, an amphitheater, a children's spray fountain and a county civic building, the suburban equivalent of a village green. Townhomes and lofts are being built on the west side of the center's main street.

With three big new Canyon housing developments to the south — 1,500 families — and no nearby competition for shopping and services, the sooner the better.

For those wishing to save a few bucks on gasoline or lose a few pounds, it will be possible to bike or walk from the Canyon neighborhoods to the town center.

With housing going up all around, taken together with the new Sunset Palms Elementary School just east of the town center and the Bethesda Health City complex, there is little doubt that this is the potential center of manifest westward growth in Palm Beach County.

Friedman's job is to put all the pieces together on time. Three banks, Walgreens, Panera Bread, other restaurants and shops have already signed leases. Friedman plans to deliver a 54,000-square foot Publix to the grocery-store chain, to be ready for pre-Thanksgiving shoppers.

The town center is also the northernmost major shopping area in the Agricultural Reserve, a 21,000-acre mix of vegetable farms, nurseries, stables and upscale housing developments in the still relatively green center of southern Palm Beach County.

Only two such centers have been authorized in the Ag Reserve plan. Ground has been broken for a second marketplace area at Lyons Road and West Atlantic Avenue.

The town center's design is dotted with various colors and surfaces, dolled up with decorative brick and stone, all meant to evoke the varying architectural features of a small town, 2008-style.

Helicopters are not the only ones keeping an eye on the center. It has also received the blessings of the Coalition of Boynton West Residential Associations, the powerful watchdog group for residents in and around the Ag Reserve. The group's leadership, which casts a critical eye on every new development in the area, not only approved the center but described it as a boon for the fast-growing area.  One last detail is extending the closing time for restaurants at the town center from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. on weekends. The time extension has been proposed as a variance to Palm Beach County officials.

So far, the consensus seems to be in favor of later hours. "Boynton Beach closes down pretty early," said Dan Lishansky, president of the Cobblestone Creek neighborhood on Lyons Road north of the town center. "It would be refreshing to have a quality restaurant nearby that would stay open late enough to have a late dinner."