Having spent last week walking through North Fair Oaks, and the week before walking through San Carlos and Belmont, this week I focused on Redwood City. To no one’s surprise, work continues on the city’s largest projects — Stanford Health Care’s new medical building, the apartment-and-fitness-center project underway along East Bayshore, and Broadway Plaza — but while going out to look at projects like those I did discover two or three surprises.

This week, rather than use the Highway 101 pedestrian/cyclist underpass to get from one side of the freeway to the other (and thus out to East Bayshore), I took Whipple Avenue. While at Whipple and Veterans Boulevard I looked to the north, and did a double-take: it seems that Carlsen Subaru is gone!

It figures; I’ve been thinking that my next car would probably be a Subaru, and I loved this convenient location (for me, anyway; it is within relatively easy walking distance of my home). Sadly, Carlsen Subaru doesn’t seem to have simply relocated: they appear to have closed for good. So when it is time to get a new car, I’ll be heading up to Burlingame. More importantly, though, Redwood City gets a lot of tax dollars from its automobile dealerships, so the city is presumably not thrilled with this latest departure. Perhaps a new dealership will occupy this space — or perhaps the property will be redeveloped for some other use. I’ll be watching…

When I last reported on the large apartment building under construction at 557 E. Bayshore Rd., the central parking garage had reached four levels (out of five) and the five floors of apartments that will eventually wrap the garage on three sides were beginning to be framed up to the east and west. Now, though, the apartments on the south side are being framed up as well:

On the west and south sides, apartments have yet to rise higher than the ground floor. On the east side, however, much of the second floor (also out of five) is now in place:

This 222-unit for-rent apartment building is located well away from the street, out towards the bay. Back along the street, I’m seeing more evidence of site preparation for the nearly 100,000-square-foot VillaSport Athletic Club and Spa:

The backhoe you can see in the above photograph was working on the future site of the club. Currently there are a lot of flags and orange stakes on that part of the property that presumably mark out where the building will be built. Note the good progress on the future road that will run from East Bayshore out toward the bay side of the property, providing access to the garage that will form the center of the second apartment building (which apparently will be built sometime after the two under-construction buildings are complete).

Over in Red Morton Park, some sort of work continues to be done on the Veterans Memorial Building/Senior Center, but most of that is being done inside, where I can’t see it. The outside continues to look completely finished (including the landscaping), but with no announcement of a completion date, I’ll just have to keep watching.

Right next door, however, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the temporary dog park appears to be getting an upgrade to permanent status: the temporary fence that had been made from PVC and plastic netting appears to be getting replaced by nice-looking metal fencing:

(When I took the above photo, the post holes had been dug and the fence posts had been dropped in, but the posts had yet to be staked upright and the holes had yet to be filled with concrete. By now, that may have been done.)

Along Vera Avenue, the five-unit townhouse development underway at 239 Vera Ave. looks to have stalled: when I went there the site was locked up and there was no evidence of any work being done. I’ve seen little progress in the last month or two, so I’m getting a bit concerned.

Along the right side, where the entrances to most of the townhouses are located, this thing really has the look of an abandoned project:

This project is so close to completion that surely it won’t sit this way for long. Undoubtedly the neighbors really want it to be wrapped up.

Very close by, at 211 (through 217) Vera Ave., I was surprised to see that the parking strip in front of the ten-unit townhouse development that wrapped up in early 2023 has suddenly been dug out, and appears to be getting re-landscaped:

The previous landscaping wasn’t all that exciting, being mostly mulch with widely scattered individual plants:

One block closer to El Camino Real, the foundation for the seven-story, 176-unit affordable housing building continues to be assembled:

This is one of the most complex foundations I’ve ever seen. Eventually all of this rebar and piping will be embedded in a very thick slab of concrete. I was interested to note that the rebar has now been extended all the way to Vera Avenue; before this, the portion of the property closest to Vera has been left bare, so that the contractors had a place for their equipment and materials. Now, though, with the portion out close to Vera Avenue pretty much done, I suspect that the concrete pour won’t be long now.

This building will occupy almost the entirety of the property; it will extend from close to the sidewalk along Vera Avenue to just short of the alley that splits the block between Vera and Madison avenues (behind the building there will be parking for six vehicles, so there will be just enough space behind the building for those). From that alley, here is what the foundation looks like:

There will also be room for a walkway along either side of the building. The walkway that will run along the side of the building visible in the above image will be the wider of the two: it will also be used when wheeling the dumpsters from the building’s two ground-floor trash collection rooms out to the parking strip along Vera Avenue, where they will sit on trash collection day.

Out on El Camino Real, I looked across the street and was not entirely surprised to see that the Togo’s sandwich shop and the Baskin Robbins ice cream shop, both of which had been located in the Franklin Street Apartments building, are both gone, and that all of that buildings ground-floor retail spaces are now for lease;

I always wondered how much business these folks got, and so am not all that surprised that they have moved out.

Stanford Health Care’s nine-story medical office building continues to make great progress:

Once all of the steel structural elements are covered with what I presume is a corrosion-resistant coating (the white stuff on the lower six floors in the above photograph), the next step might be to apply the building’s exterior skin and glazing. None of this is a surprise, except perhaps when one considers how quickly this thing is going up. But after looking at the building from Broadway, I went a bit further south, to Second Avenue, and then made my way back up Bay Road. That is where I got a pretty big surprise:

Much of the block along the west side of Bay Road between Second Avenue and Barron Avenue has been cleared: the full length of the block along Bay, and halfway back towards Spring Street. In late 2022, a roughly 31,000-square foot research-and-development building project was approved for a portion of this site, but that project was only supposed to occupy about a third of the block along Bay Road, at the Second Avenue end. That original project had nothing to do with Stanford, but I suspect that what is going on here now may actually be a future expansion to Stanford’s Redwood City campus, which is located just across the street. Complicating things slightly is the fact that the portion of the block where the 2966 Bay Road project was to have been built is within Redwood City’s boundaries, while the rest of the block is unincorporated San Mateo County. Thus, I may need to dig through the county’s records to see if I can figure out what is going on here. Very possibly, Stanford (or, just maybe, someone else) has acquired all of this land and is holding it for a future use. Whatever it turns out to be, clearing all the way down to Barron Avenue signals to me that something far more than the original 2966 Bay Road project is likely be going on. I note that the 2966 Bay Road project has not been granted building permits (although I do see a demolition permit), which is a further clue that something else may be going on here. This one clearly deserves additional investigation…

All of this week’s surprises are the kind of things one would likely only discover by getting out there and noticing the changes in person; they aren’t things that are mentioned in municipal newsletters or included on websites listing major city or county projects. Frankly, they are the kind of things that I think make this blog particularly valuable: not many people seem to be out there continually looking for changes to our community and then publicizing them the way I do here. So I’m glad to be doing this, and will keep reporting on the little surprises, as well as the well-advertised less-surprising projects.