This was a short week for me: I spent last weekend plus the first two days of this week in the San Diego area, first attending a family wedding, and then spending some quality time with my wife, kids, and grandkids in San Diego proper. The wedding was a blast, but somewhat hot: the venue was in Rancho Bernardo, which is north and somewhat east of downtown San Diego; the ceremony was outdoors, in the full sun (some of the seats were shaded, but none of those were available by the time we got there); and it was a 90+ degree day. Oh, and did I mention that it was a formal event, meaning that I had to wear a dark suit? Thankfully, the ceremony itself was brief, and all of the reception areas were undercover (but still outdoors).

That left Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to catch up on the latest in Redwood City — and Wednesday was mostly taken up with various household chores plus the rather excellent concert in the park, for which we arrived early to get a good spot. This week the band was the Traveling Wilburys Revue, and as you might guess they not only played songs from the Traveling Wilburys too-short catalog, but also songs done by the individual members of the original group when they weren’t posing as members of the fictitious Wilbury family. (If you’ve never heard of the Traveling Wilburys, the band was made up of George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan.) Not only was the music spot on for my age group, the cover band was quite good in their own right. Here’s one vote for bringing these guys back next year!

Anyway, although the Redwood City Planning Commission approved two projects in its meeting this week, those will keep: actual construction on either project likely won’t begin for quite some time. For the record, though, the projects they approved were the 112-room, five-story Hyatt Place hotel at the corner of Broadway and Beech Street, and the proposed transformation of the Roy’s Drive-In Cleaners building at the corner of El Camino Real and Harrison Avenue into a Hot Pot restaurant. I last wrote about both of these projects in my post It’s Alive, on May 12; see that post if you want some background on them before I get around to writing a more in-depth description of each.

Given that I had relatively little time to explore the city, this week I have to once again fall back upon my old stand-by of simply providing an update on some of the more interesting projects currently underway in Redwood City right now, all of which continue to make slow but steady progress.

First up, I checked in on the status of our new CVS Pharmacy, at the intersection of Woodside and Bay roads. The building itself looks complete, as does the parking lot. All of the work I am now seeing is focused on the site’s landscaping, which looks pretty much ready for planting: all of the irrigation seems to be in place. One new addition this week, though, are a set of large pots that presumably will be planted with trees:

I am fascinated by the rather deep channel that runs between the parking lot and the sidewalk on the Bay Road side of the property:

This is what is known as a bioretention pond. It will be filled with a sandwich of “strategically designed layers” that are designed to filter out pollutants, contaminants, and harmful nutrients from rainwater runoff coming from the parking lot (and from the sidewalk, I guess). For the curious (like me), bioretention pond layers include gravel, mulch, and soils.

Across the street, the portion of the large Broadway Plaza property currently being worked on is slowly being lowered: at least four large backhoes are actively digging the soil out from what was the western half of the property, which used to be mostly surface parking but also included most of the stores that made up the Broadway Plaza shopping center (only the CVS Pharmacy remains; it will be torn down shortly after the new one across the street opens for business):

This is a huge excavation project. The entire site is about 11.2 acres in size. The half of the property currently under construction will essentially have one underground parking level (consuming the entire half of the parcel; roughly 5.6 acres in size) and one above-ground level. When the old CVS Pharmacy is torn down and work begins on the other half, though, that portion of the garage will go deeper, putting both parking levels completely underground. If my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct, excavating just the half of the property shown in the photo above involves digging up and hauling away something like 81,000 cubic yards of soil. It should be worth it, however: the two levels of the garage on this half of the property will provide something like 550 parking spaces, spaces that, unlike with the old shopping center, won’t be visible from the surrounding streets.

As a reminder, the Broadway Plaza project will ultimately consists of three office buildings (the ones highlighted in blue in the above) and three residential buildings (plus some retail and a childcare center in the residential building along Broadway), with 1.6 acres of open space separating the residences from the offices. (The new CVS Pharmacy across Woodside Road is also part of this project.) The portion of the property now under construction — at the end towards Chestnut Street — is where the residential buildings will be located. In total, those three will contain 520 for-rent apartments, 120 of which will be affordable. The three office buildings will eventually be constructed on the other half of the property, towards Woodside Road. Beneath all of this will be one giant parking garage, with 400 parking spaces dedicated to the residents, 1,035 parking spaces dedicated to the offices, and an additional 274 spaces that will be shared between them. During working hours those shared spaces will be for office use, but after hours and on weekends they will be available for use by the residents living in the three apartment buildings.

Heading up Chestnut Street, I spent time encircling the massive ELCO Yards project on foot. That project, as you may recall, will consist of four large office buildings and two large residential buildings, all on a set of parcels that used to house Towne Ford, Hopkins Acura, and various other businesses (a third residential building is also part of the project, but that building is offsite and has already been completed, at 1304 El Camino Real). Here is the map for this project’s main site:

Buildings A and D will be the residential buildings. B, C, and the two E buildings will be offices. B is where Towne Ford used to have their showroom (the parcel fronts onto El Camino Real) and A is where Hopkins Acura used to be. The two E buildings are distinct, but are so designated because they will share one very large parcel and will both sit atop one very large parking garage. This garage:

The lowest level of this two-level subterranean garage is complete, and the floor for the upper level is half done: the portion closest to Chestnut Street (where I stood to take the above photograph) has been poured, while the portion at the “E-North” end (closest to the Main Street Dog Agility Park) is still being prepped for its concrete pour.

Here is another photograph of the same garage, showing a better view of the ramp between the two garage levels:

Also note all of the vertically oriented rebar for the support posts that will hold up the buildings that will soon rise up from this site. I’d be fascinated to know just how much rebar went into just this one garage.

The building E garage will be fairly large: with the aid of a valet service, it should have room for 508 cars and 26 motorcycles. I should note that 26 of the car parking spaces will be for use by the public, since in addition to the two office buildings, this parcel will also be home to a bit of public open space and a small restaurant (on the corner where Chestnut and Main intersect).

Work on parcel C has been slow to get going, but it is now well underway. Excavation of that building’s two-level, 333-space garage only got underway a few weeks ago, and for a while it proceeded slowly. Now, though, it seems to be making steady progress:

Finally, the three-level, 312-space garage that will sit beneath building B was the first of all three to really get underway, but now it is playing catch-up to the one that will be beneath the two E buildings. Only in the last couple of days has some amount of concrete been poured:

As you can see, this site, too, will be getting its own tower crane, to complement the one on parcel E.

Building B, which will sit atop this last garage, is in some ways the most interesting of the four commercial buildings. Not only will it include a childcare center, but also a large portion of its ground floor and a portion of a mezzanine level will be dedicated to a “family entertainment tenant.” I’m not aware that a definite use or tenant has been completely nailed down, but this is where the developer has talked about putting a roller rink or a bowling alley. Certainly, the building has been designed for such: the retail space on the ground floor is almost 17,000 square feet in size, and I believe it has been designed with no vertical supports to break up the large open space.

The three garages shown above will sit beneath the development’s four office buildings. As for the two residential buildings, they, too, will one day have their own subterranean garages. However, for now those two parcels are being used to stage materials and equipment for the office projects now underway. Exactly when they will get underway, I do not know. What I do know is that they will be built under contract by Greystar, the folks who obtained all of the parcels and [I believe] took the ELCO Yards project through the approval stage, before selling it to IQHQ.

That’s pretty much it for this week. I did note that Spirit Halloween already has their signs up on the old Pier One Imports building in Sequoia Station; while I can’t believe that they are actually open yet (it is only July!), the sign indicates that they’ll once again have a presence in Redwood City in time for the spooky season. Oh, and my wife sent me a picture of something that she noticed while shopping at Signona’s Farmers Market:

The folks selling Japanese Maples on the corner of Middlefield Road and Willow Street are having a “huge fundraising sale” to raise money to replace their tractor, which apparently was stolen. If you are in the market for some Japanese Maple trees, be a good neighbor and pay this place a visit. They have some really beautiful trees…