Sometimes it seems that small Redwood City businesses just can’t catch a break. Hassett Ace Hardware in Woodside Plaza is still temporarily closed while they recover from a car that drove through their front window, although they seem to be making great progress and hopefully will be back open next month as planned. I went by earlier today and saw that much of the store’s front glass is back in place:

Those guys you can see just below the “ACE” sign were drilling large holes in the sidewalk, presumably for the new bollards that will protect this storefront in the future. They were using a really big drill with a bit that appeared to be a giant hole saw:

But while Hassett nears the end of their recovery process, Dehoff’s Key Market, at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Upton Street is just getting started on theirs. In case you haven’t heard, a good-sized truck, apparently coming down the hill on Roosevelt Avenue, seemingly tried to make the left turn onto Upton Street but instead plowed right into the market. Fortunately, they hit the building squarely where the open cooler with the bulk of the market’s organic produce was arrayed, and only damaged that wall and one of the glass front windows:

The folks at Key apparently worked quite quickly to get the wall temporarily patched up, and although the organic produce case is still closed off, the rest of the market is very much open and doing business:

Finally, although they’ve been back open for a while now, my wife and I finally made it back to Big Brothers Burgers (in the Roosevelt Center, just across Roosevelt Avenue from Key Market) for lunch, and I’m pleased to note that they seem to once again be doing well, with no lingering signs of the fire that caused them to close for so long (that fire wasn’t in the restaurant, but was in the liquor store two doors down). If you like a good (big!) burger, do check them out. I really like that with your burger you can get tater tots in addition to the usual fries or onion rings…

On this week’s walk I checked in on the new Veterans Memorial Building/Senior Center building. Although it still is not open (can you believe it?), they’ve gone so far as to put a whole lot of patio furniture out on the “pedestrian promenade” in front of the building:

Not only is there furniture scattered around the promenade, there are a number of tables and chairs up on the second level as well, where the outdoor walking track is located:

I sure hope that this is a sign that the building is finally about to open to the public…

Walking down Vera Avenue from the park, the five-unit townhouse project at 239 Vera has most of its driveway — they’ve used pavers — and some of the walkway that will run to the front doors:

As you can see, though, they still need to finish up some underground piping before that walkway can be extended the rest of the way out to the sidewalk (where I was standing when I took this photo). That walkway is also being done with pavers; there was a huge stack of them along the street when I was there.

One block down, the 178-unit affordable apartment building underway at 112 Vera Avenue continues to make progress. From the rear, the crew seems about ready to pour the concrete for what will be the third level’s floor:

From the front, though, there are still a lot of concrete structural elements that need to be poured, and then the forms for that portion of the second level’s floor need to be built. Most of the building will consist of similarly sized and shaped apartments, but especially along the front there are a number of offices and such that need to be custom-built. Thus all of the structural walls and such you can see being built in this image:

I still believe that this building will be constructed using a lot of modular components. The building is slated to have 25 studios and 153 one-bedroom apartments, and all of the studios seem to be identically sized (at 411 square feet) and all of the one-bedroom units are also identically sized (at 450 square feet). Thus, I can picture all of the apartments being assembled offsite and then trucked in and craned into place one-by-one. That would be easy enough on the upper five floors, but may not be so easy on the first two (they would have to be slipped into place from the side). Thus, it’s possible that the apartments on the building’s two lower floors will be built conventionally. But we’ll see…

On the subject of affordable apartment buildings under construction, I walked to the northern end of San Carlos this week, and along the way I checked in on the Cherry Street Commons project, on Cherry Street just west of Laurel Street:

As you can see, the building is coming along very nicely.

The reason I walked to the far end of San Carlos is because I had driven through that city along El Camino Real earlier in the week, and noted that not only is the 11 El Camino Real project site now surrounded by construction fencing, there is also a large backhoe parked on the property. I was hoping to see some signs of demolition of the old CVS Pharmacy that stands on the site, but when I was there the building was still largely untouched:

I’ll write more about this project when work actually gets underway, but it is to be a six-story, 251-unit apartment building (with 38 of the apartments being affordable at either the Low or Very Low income levels).

That about does it for this week’s post; the other projects throughout both Redwood City and San Carlos continue to make steady progress. But I do want to end with a reminder that Redwood City is still recruiting for a variety of boards, commissions, and committees (BCCs). The city has a total of 27 vacancies across the following:

• Architectural Advisory Committee
• Arts Commission
• Board of Building Review
• Board of Port Commissioners
• Historic Resources Advisory Committee
• Housing and Human Concerns Committee
• Library Board
• Parks, Recreation and Community Services Commission
• Planning Commission
• Senior Affairs Commission

Applications will be accepted until Sunday, May 3, after which qualified applicants will be interviewed by the City Council. Most positions have very simple requirements, although, as you might expect, a few — the Architectural Advisory Committee, for instance — require some relevant expertise. See this web page for details and for a link to the online application.