These days there are a number of projects, of varying sizes and either underway or soon to be, in and around Redwood City. I haven’t come up with a good way to put these in any logical order, so pardon my skipping around. I will, however, begin with some of the usual ones before moving on to a number of new, mostly smaller items.

The seven-story affordable apartment building under construction at 112 Vera Ave. no longer shows signs of having been largely assembled from pre-built modules. Now, it just looks like any other building project that is well along in the development process:

Out on the bay, the two buildings underway on the former site of Redwood City’s Century Park 12 Theatres continue to make progress. The apartment building is really showing off its exterior finishes now, even when viewed through the mesh covering on the scaffolding:

Elsewhere on the property, the large Villa Sport Athletic Club appears to be fully framed; now it receiving the vertical members that will support the building’s exterior surface (most easily visible on the left side):

As well, there is now a lot of activity between the above building and the street, where the two outdoor pools (there will also be two indoor pools) will be located.

Up in San Carlos, digging is now well underway for the one underground level of the two-level parking garage that will be part of the 251-unit apartment building soon to rise at 11 El Camino Real, where previously there was a CVS Pharmacy:

Skipping way south, down in a small pocket of Menlo Park that intrudes upon Redwood City’s eastern border, a 163-room hotel project is underway at 3723 Haven Ave.:

The site of this project is just one block up from Marsh Road, east of highway 101. If you’ve ever been to the FedEx shipping center down there, the project is quite close by. There used to be a one-story office building on the site, but as you can see it has since been torn down. The hotel that will soon rise on the site — “Moxy by Marriott” will be seven stories in height, with parking for 129 vehicles on the first and second floors (with mechanical stackers on the second floor to squeeze in the requisite number of cars). There will be a coffee shop on the ground floor, a bar and lounge on the third floor, and an outdoor rooftop garden also on the third floor. That garden, incidentally, will be open to the public, as will the coffee shop (but maybe not the bar?). Here is a rendering from the plans submitted to the city:

Back in Redwood City, the project to relocate some underground phone lines in advance of the 1900 Broadway project — the old Wells Fargo building that will be replaced by a seven-story office-and-retail project (that includes a public plaza!) — continues:

There are some piles of construction debris on the other side of the bank building, but those appear to be from this utility relocation project; they are not a sign that the bank building is being demolished (yet). That will likely happen soon, but I should note that the permit for the building’s demolition has not yet been finalized.

Speaking of demolition, we are one step closer to witnessing the demolition of the old Veterans Memorial Building/Senior Center building. This one:

With the new, next-door Veterans Memorial Building/Senior Center up and running, this older building is no longer needed. Accordingly, the city is accepting bids from companies interested in bidding on the demolition project until mid-day on Monday, August 31. After that, presuming that one or more bids were submitted, the city will consider whether to accept one of those bids. And assuming it does, we should then hear when the demolition will actually take place. For now it appears that after demolition the area will be planted with grass, since it’ll likely be another year or two at least before construction of Redwood City’s new YMCA — which will be built on this spot — gets underway.

This week I walked around the perimeter (as much as I could get to, anyway) of the Hoover Park renovation project. From Spring Street it’s a little hard to tell how much progress is being made, but from the Boys & Girls Club side there are much better views. Most of what you can see is still just dirt being moved around, but some paths have already been poured, and the area where the new artificially-turfed volleyball court will go looks about ready for its turf (on the right in the following photo):

In the following photo, the white concrete slab you can just make out to the right of the yellow dumpster appears to be the base for the park’s new “splash pad”:

Finally, the following photo, looking out towards Woodside Road, shows the parking-lot turnaround being formed (in the center of the image) and the space where the park’s “fitness area” will be located (in the foreground):

Out on Veterans Boulevard, the stand-alone restaurant building in the parking lot of Redwood City’s former Kmart, that used to be an Applebee’s, is being renovated for a new tenant:

And the rumors are true: it is becoming a Black Bear Diner — which I gather will excite a number of you out there.

If you don’t regularly drive up and down Vera Avenue, know that the street’s many roundabouts, which up until now had simply been painted in the center of a number of that street’s intersections, are becoming “real”:

Lastly, although it isn’t a development project, I finally have a reason to once again post a photo of the buildings that pretty much started downtown Redwood City’s great transformation: the “Box” buildings (in reality, “Crossing 900”; Box is just their largest tenant):

Box just extended their lease until 2040. Regardless of how you feel about the buildings themselves, the addition of Box as a tenant to Redwood City’s downtown back in 2015 gave the area a big boost, and helped encourage other development projects and other tenants. Box’s new lease did reduce the amount of square footage it will be occupying, apparently by about 1/3. But Box’s new lease is for some 243,000 square feet of the development’s roughly 301,000-square-foot total. By my calculations, that works out to the entirety of the left-hand building and about two of the right-hand building’s four upper floors. I should note that the right-hand building already has another tenant or two who may have been sub-leasing from Box; if they are, that likely confuses the issue. But in any case, Box is here to stay, and I have to think that any space freed up by this new lease won’t be empty for all that long.

The large 1900 Broadway (ex-Wells Fargo Bank) project will likely get underway in the next couple of months, as will, I’m guessing, one or both of the tall apartment buildings that will be constructed as part of the ELCO Yards development (on the dirt lot at El Camino and Maple, and on the other dirt lot at Lathrop and Elm). Until they do, there is still plenty of construction and destruction going on in and around Redwood City. And considering the large number of projects on the “Proposed” list of Redwood City Development Projects, like it or not, it seems clear that Redwood City will continue to grow and change for years to come.