I have a walk I do periodically that I used to call my “big loop.” I begin at my home near Sequoia Hospital, and follow Alameda de las Pulgas to the south. When I reach Woodside Road, I turn east and follow it down to Broadway. Turning left on Broadway, I walk along that street in the direction of downtown until I reach Maple Street. Turning right on Maple, I follow it over the freeway and out to the Bay. Then I work my way through Docktown (back when Docktown was still a thing; nowadays I take the path beside the 1548 Maple Street project site), take the “bridge to nowhere” over Redwood Creek, and then duck beneath Highway 101 using the underpass. From there I follow Main Street for two blocks before turning right onto Brewster Avenue, which leads me home. That is a good, long walk, and with some minor detours allows me to keep tabs on many of Redwood City’s more interesting development projects. And it is great exercise.

Although I still take that walk from time-to-time, I now have another route that also forms a neat loop starting and ending at my home. This new loop is quite a bit longer than my older one, though, and has me thinking that I should come up with a new name for my former “big loop.” “Medium loop,” perhaps? Or maybe I should just leave it alone, and call my new one my “bigger loop”?

Recently I took my new big loop, which takes me up through Belmont, over the freeway just beyond Ralston Avenue, and then back towards home on the Bay side of the freeway. This bigger loop allows me to keep an eye on most of the projects going on in both San Carlos and Belmont, as well as on the office project being constructed along Twin Dolphin Drive in Redwood Shores.

Following the projects in San Carlos can be tricky, given that much of the recent construction has been split between the downtown area and the east side (the area between the Caltrain tracks and Highway 101). To really do a thorough job in San Carlos, I need to walk up El Camino Real or Laurel Street, and then walk back along Industrial Road. But I don’t want to add too much distance to an already long walk — my new big loop is on the order of 13 miles — and so I didn’t bother trying to see all of San Carlos in one go, at least on this particular walk.

These days, to get to San Carlos I find myself walking north on Alameda de las Pulgas in order to check up on the replacement fire station being constructed at the corner of Alameda and Howard Avenue. Before I get there, though, I make a small detour a couple of blocks east on St. Francis Way, to check on the progress of the modular home project at 183 Ruby St. This one:

Although this project continues to make progress, it is going surprisingly slowly. It first came to my attention last August, when I caught site of, and then followed, a truck carrying some of the modules that have been assembled into the house you see above. The modules were unloaded and put into place that day, and I assumed that because the modules make up most of the finished house, that the remaining work would be completed in a matter of months. But it has been nearly nine months now, and the house has yet to receive its exterior finishes.

Back out on Alameda de las Pulgas, I finally made it to the firehouse site. That project is nearing completion, it seems:

The outside is looking great. I can’t attest to the state of the building’s interior, of course, but I suspect that it is well along, and that the building will be operational in another month or two.

From here, I headed down to El Camino Real to get some final pictures of the mixed-use project that has now wrapped up at 1240 El Camino Real:

This most recently was the site of a single-story building housing the Zest Bakery (a gluten-free bakery, I believe). Now, this new four-story building contains eight for-sale condominiums (one of which will be made affordable at the Moderate income level) and a single ground-floor retail space (on the El Camino Real face, naturally). Behind that retail space is a ground-floor parking garage with room for 12 vehicles that you enter from the back alley:

This project was approved in October of 2019, and got underway in the fall of 2021.

From here, I walked one block to Laurel Street and then followed Laurel north, to Morse Boulevard and the site of yet another project that has essentially wrapped up:

This new building, at 993 Laurel St., is a three-story, mixed-use (office and retail) building. It, too, has an internal parking garage — this one with room for 31 cars — that is also accessed from the building’s rear alley. It replaced a single-story building that used to be home to “Headlines,” a hair salon.

Because it was not too far out of the way, I next cruised by 817 Walnut St. This affordable housing project contains 24 apartments (23 reserved for those at the Very Low income level, and one, I presume, for the building’s manager) in a four-story building that stands behind San Carlos’s Bianchini’s Market. This project has been completed for some time, but I took the opportunity to take some final images of the completed building. Here is a view from the parking lot behind the market:

And here is a view from Walnut Street:

As you can see, the building is tall and thin — which it had to be given the size and shape of the lot on which it sits. Note the garage doors; this development apparently has on-site spots for 20 vehicles (not all of which, I believe, are inside the building).

One final San Carlos project still beckoned: Portal 405, the large life science research and development building being erected on the northwest corner of Holly Street and Highway 101, just behind the In-N-Out Burger restaurant. The new building, which will consist of four stories of office space atop two levels of above-ground parking (and one level of below-ground parking; the garage in total will have room for 422 cars) appears to have reached the point where its steel structure is pretty much complete:

It is pretty amazing how many life sciences buildings San Carlos will soon have; I’ll do a roundup of the existing, in-the-works, and planned projects sometime in the near future. In any case, I’ll be watching closely to see how quickly the space in this one leases.

The entrance to Portal 405 is off Industrial Road, using the driveway you can see just to the left of the In-N-Out Burger. Thus, to continue on to Belmont I simply walked up Industrial Road. But along the way I saw a couple of interesting things.

First off, you may have read that not too long after Kelly-Moore Paints moved their headquarters from San Carlos (where the company was founded, back in 1946) to Texas, the company completely ceased operations and thus is no more. For many years their headquarters were located at 915 Old County Road, but when most of the large block upon which the company sat was purchased by Alexandria Real Estate Equities (the folks behind the Alexandria Center for Life Science along Industrial Road), Kelly-Moore Paints moved to 320 Industrial Rd. Then, they moved to Texas. On my way to Belmont I walked by their short-lived headquarters building on Industrial Road, and was interested to note that although Kelly-Moore is gone, their building will still be a place for paint:

Upon reaching Belmont, I jogged west to Old County Road, and turned north to get some pictures of another recently completed project, the massive Artisan Crossing apartments building at 1325 Old County Rd. This project was built by a local developer — Windy Hill Property Ventures — and consumes a large part of a city block just east of the Caltrain tracks at O’Neill Avenue. From the street, it looks great:

From this angle the building may not look that big, but within there are 250 apartments, 15% of which are intended to be affordable at the Low income level. As I recall, among the project’s community benefits were funds to determine the feasibility of constructing a pedestrian underpass beneath the Caltrain tracks at O’Neill Avenue, which would greatly benefit this development’s residents since directly on the other side of the elevated tracks is Belmont’s Safeway shopping center. Another stated benefit was the triangular public plaza directly in front of the building. Sadly, that plaza is, as you can probably see, quite small and thus likely to not get much use by the public. Finally, though, the developer set aside ground-floor space just to the right of the main entrance for a nonprofit music school, and I was delighted to see that the school has indeed moved in. The Community School of Music and Arts is now offering art and music programs in their new dedicated space, which includes private lesson studios and a large space for group classes. Their grand opening is scheduled for May 11 from 2-5 p.m., so if this sounds at all interesting, do check them out.

Further up Old County Road, just north of Ralston Avenue, I checked in on The Hayden Belmont, a luxury apartment development, and saw that it is complete and now leasing. While I have yet to go inside, from the outside the new development looks quite attractive:

The Hayden offers 177 apartments ranging in size from studios, starting at 512 square feet, up to two-bedroom, two-bathroom units up to 1,054 square feet in size. It appears to have the usual set of amenities you would expect in a new luxury apartment complex. The apartments include in-unit washers and dryers, smart thermostats, and keyless entry. Within the building there is a garage offering secure parking and some number of EV chargers.

Heading back to Ralston Avenue, I then headed east on the north side of the street. Although there are crosswalks and sidewalks that enable a pedestrian to cross over Highway 101 at Ralston, I prefer to utilize the cycling/pedestrian walkway that arches over the freeway just north of Ralston Avenue. That walkway drops down in the middle of the Belmont Sports Complex, just north of Autobahn Motors (a Mercedes-Benz dealership). From the complex I then made my way back to Ralston Avenue (back in Redwood City, it is named Marine Parkway) and walked east until I reached Twin Dolphin Drive. Turning south on Twin Dolphin, I enjoyed a leisurely stroll down to the Grand Bay Hotel (which I still think of as the Sofitel) and, directly across the street, the next project on my list: 200 Twin.

On my last visit the steel framing was incomplete, but now it looks as if it might be about done:

This five-story office building is, as you can see, out on the corner of Twin Dolphin and Shoreline drives. Behind it, a five-level parking garage (with a whopping 690 parking spaces!) is also under construction:

This project completed my list, but of course my walk was not yet done: I still had to get home. From here, I simply continued south along Twin Dolphin Drive to Redwood Shores Parkway, where I turned right. When I reached Airport Way, I turned in and walked around the west side of the airport to the south end, where a paved bicycle/pedestrian path runs right alongside Highway 101. That path took me to Whipple Avenue, but I didn’t get off there: I don’t like dodging cars entering and exiting the freeway at Whipple Avenue, and the sidewalks along E. Bayshore Road are spotty. Instead, I continued along the path until I reached Bair Island Road, at which point I turned west and followed the road out to the Courtyard by Marriott hotel and the entrance to the Highway 101 underpass. Taking the underpass, I then used Main Street and Brewster Avenue to get me back home.

With the major projects in Belmont having wrapped up, I may not take this particular walk again for a while. Then again, I may since I still need to keep an eye on 200 Twin, and the loop walk is more interesting than walking up and back along the east side of the freeway. In any case, I’ll be staying a bit closer to home for the next several weeks; there is still a lot going on in Redwood City, San Carlos, and North Fair Oaks. And for that, I can take smaller (but still 8-10 mile) walks.