Every other week or so, I do what I think of as my “loop walk.” Over the years, that loop has expanded: it used to be that I’d start from my home in the vicinity of Sequoia Hospital, follow Alameda de las Pulgas out to Woodside Road, head down Woodside Road to El Camino Real, follow El Camino Real up to Broadway, and then walk up Broadway back towards home. That was a good walk, but as new projects came online that I wanted to keep tabs on, I found that I had to modify — and expand — my walk significantly. For one, I started dropping by Red Morton Park, first to keep an eye on the Magical Bridge Playground as it was being built, and now to monitor the progress of the Veterans Memorial/Senior Center project. Then, as things started happening on the bay side of Highway 101, instead of starting back towards home along El Camino Real, I would instead follow that street as far as Maple Street, which I’d then use to walk over the highway and explore the projects there. I would then return via Maple, at least until the Highway 101 Pedestrian Undercrossing was completed, at which point I would instead head through Docktown Marina, pass over the Bridge to Nowhere, and then use the undercrossing to get to Main Street, after which I’d follow Brewster Avenue back to my neck of the woods. Finally, once the Broadway Plaza project got underway, instead of following Maple Street all the way from El Camino Real, I instead started using Chestnut Street to make my way from El Camino Real down to Broadway. After exploring the parcels involved in the Broadway Plaza project, I’d continue along Chestnut out to Veterans Boulevard, and follow Veterans to Maple Street, where I’d again head over the highway, etc.

Hopefully you were able to follow all of that. If not, well, hopefully you get the gist.

The loop I take these days is a lot longer than before, but it is a good walk and one that allows me to look in on pretty much all of the major projects going on within Redwood City in one go. I took that walk this week, and will use this post to provide some updates to the projects I saw along the way. Later in the week I also took another, shorter walk in an entirely different direction, and will provide some updates from that one, too.

First up, the Veterans Memorial/Senior Center project. The big news this week is that there is scaffolding up all around the building, indicating that the contractors are finally close to applying the building’s exterior finishes. Here is a view of the building from along Madison Avenue:

And here is what the building looks like from the side facing the parking lot that you access from Madison Avenue:

From the park, I then typically wander the residential areas in order to make my way out to Woodside Road; the route I most typically take follows Kentfield Avenue for a portion. Along that street is a project I’ve written about before: the replacement of an old, run-down single-family home at 1460 Kentfield Ave. with a duplex and two ADUs. So far, the contractor has framed up a building along the back of the property that I’m guessing will house the two ADUs:

Once I got to Woodside Road, I visited two projects that are currently underway just across the street from one another. First, the renovation of the Bravo Taqueria restaurant. I had been led to believe that this was going to be a fairly light remodel, to make the place more ADA-friendly, but as you can see it is turning out to be far more than just a minor update:

When they closed their doors for this project they indicated that they planned to reopen in the fall. Maybe they can still make that, but I’m not holding my breath.

Pretty much directly across the street from Bravo Taqueria (and the 5th Quarter Pizza building, I should add, which is also being redone but is not showing nearly as much progress) is the 955 Woodside Townhomes project. This project will result in eight new for-sale townhomes being built on a lot that previously held a small animal hospital plus, seasonally, a space where Christmas trees were sold. Nowadays it looks like this:

This small townhouse complex will consist of two separate buildings with four townhouses each. The two buildings have been placed in an “L” shape, with one building spanning the rear of the property, and one running from front to back. Here is another view, which shows the inside of the “L”:

As you can see, the buildings are going up fairly quickly. They will be three stories tall when complete, with garages and a small den/office space each unit’s the ground floor.

When I got to El Camino Real I headed up towards Chestnut Street. On the way, I took a short jog up Roosevelt Avenue to take a look at the Mi Rancho Supermarket, which is getting a facelift:

Back out on El Camino Real, the big news on the ELCO Yards project is rather hard to miss, even if you are just driving by: a new tower crane on the parcel that once held Towne Ford’s main showroom:

Down Chestnut Street, part of the street was closed off for what I presume is utility work to support the two ELCO Yards buildings that will be built on the site that touches that street (notice all the rebar sticking into the air):

Down at Broadway Plaza, the half of the underground garage that makes up the Chestnut Street end of the project is looking good. Look carefully at the following and you can see that they’ve poured a fair amount of concrete on the floor of the garage by Chestnut Street (which is in the distance in this particular picture; it’s hard to get good photos of that garage at the moment):

As you can more easily see, the walls of that portion of the garage are also in place. I’m expecting a crane of some sort to be brought in soon, to help with the rest of the project, which will involve creating the supports needed for the buildings that will sit atop this garage, and then building those buildings.

Things are relatively quiet on the other side of Highway 101 right now, so I’ve nothing new to report there. Towards home, the Hopkins Avenue Traffic Calming project is almost as quiet, with just small things being done from time-to-time. Curiously, a tiny island by the bike lane was just constructed at Hopkins Avenue and King Street; this was in the plans, but unlike all of the other islands, this one wasn’t installed until the street had been completely repaved. Oh, and it seemingly was constructed all in one day: they poured the concrete curbing around the island and then quickly added the rocks in the center. I took this picture after they had cleaned up for the day: as you can probably tell, the curbing was still somewhat wet:

While they were at it, the contractors finally filled in the two islands that had been constructed at Hopkins Avenue and Hillview Avenue; those had been sitting hollow for months:

Now, the city just needs to install the landscaping in the center medians and redo the triangular parklet at Hopkins Avenue and Alameda de las Pulgas, and the contractor just needs to paint a couple of more lines on the street. Then, I think that this project will at long last be complete.

The other walk I took this week was into San Carlos, to check on two projects. First, I wanted to get some in-process photos of the Fire Station 16 Replacement project, which is occurring at 1280 Alameda de las Pulgas (at the corner of Howard Avenue). Here is what that fire station used to look like:

And here is what it looks like so far:

As you can probably tell, this new building is not going to blend in with the neighborhood quite as well as the old one did. But one thing this new building design does is free up space behind the building that will allow some emergency vehicles to enter from the building’s rear (using a new driveway off Howard Avenue); previously, all of the fire trucks had to back in to the bays using the garage openings on Alameda de las Pulgas. Now, although one of the bays will still require trucks to back in, the other can be entered from the rear, as you can see when you look into the bays from the Alameda de las Pulgas side of the building:

When done, the replacement fire station should look something like this:

Lastly, I dropped by the modular home at 183 Ruby Ave. (see my post Chasing Houses for some background on this project) to see if they’ve made any visible progress. There has indeed been some: immediately after the house’s six modules were put into place, there were two stacks of three modules each, with a gap between them that I was led to understand will be the home’s main entrance and stairwell. Now, that gap has been filled in, at least on the second story, along with a similar-sized add-on (that faces sideways, rather than towards the street) above the right-hand stack (behind the temporary power pole in the following image):

Fascinating stuff.

That’ll do it for this week. As a reminder, Shakespeare in the Park, which began last weekend, continues this weekend and next at Red Morton Park. See this webpage for details. Oh, and I should probably say something about the imminent closure of JuiceBox, the small wine shop at the corner of Broadway and Marshall Street (just on the downtown side of the Caltrain tracks). My wife and I have been members of their wine club ever since the place first opened (in December of 2020), and we’ll be sad to see it go. But the proprietor, Zu Tarazi, is ready to do something more meaningful, and I for one can’t wait to see what that might be. In any case, Zu will be selling off the remainder of his stock until the end of this month, when the shop will close for good. So if you are looking for something truly interesting in the way of a bottle of wine, either do what I did and drop by his shop on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday; or call (650 369-4351); or simply order directly from his website.