This week I spent some time in an interesting part of Redwood City: the portion designated within the city’s General Plan as “Industrial – Light (Incubator).” This is a subset of the city’s Light Industrial area that is intended to “promote new start-up businesses and new development related to innovative light industrial and research/development businesses.” Redwood City’s Incubator area is a four-block section of the city bounded by Bay Road, Woodside Road, Highway 101, and Douglas Avenue.

I didn’t actually head down there for the purpose of exploring the Incubator portion of the city; my original intent was to check up on the progress of Stanford’s latest construction project, which has just gotten underway adjacent to its existing medical center (between Broadway and Highway 101, just below Douglas Avenue). That project lies just beyond the Incubator area, and thus I had to walk through it to get to Stanford’s project.

Stanford’s project, which is still early in the demolition phase, will result in the construction of a new medical office building, a portion of which will be nine stories tall:

In the above rendering, you can see a portion of Stanford Health Care’s existing medical center in the lower right corner. The buildings in the lower left corner are Stanford University’s administrative campus; Broadway runs between those buildings and the to-be-constructed medical office building. Behind the office you can see another part of the current project: a new multi-story parking garage to handle the vehicles that will one day be making their way to Stanford’s enlarged Redwood City medical campus.  Those vehicles will be able to get to this new building either from Douglas Avenue, which will be extended somewhat to reach both the new garage and an adjacent pair of new surface parking lots, or from a driveway off Broadway that will lead to the entrance of this new building and on to the parking garage.

Up until now, where the shorter portion of the new building will stand — out along Broadway — there has been this somewhat unassuming two-story building:

This was once the headquarters of Ampex (now, Ampex Data Systems Corporation, headquartered in Hayward); behind this building and out along the freeway is where the large Ampex sign used to be located, for those who remember it. In any case, for years now Stanford has been using this building to house some of its administrative functions (for a time, Stanford University Press, and Stanford University Libraries [not the libraries themselves, but offices for some of the people who administer those libraries]). Those departments, I believe, are now located in one of Stanford University’s new buildings directly across Broadway.

Behind the former Ampex building — to the right of it in the above photo — a smaller building with very few windows stands where the 9-story portion of the new building will go. This building:

I’ve never worked out just what this building was used for, but its relative lack of windows made me wonder if it housed servers or other such electronic equipment, or if it might have been research or production space used by Ampex. In any case, this building is on its way out; demolition of both buildings plus the surface parking lots beside and behind both have just gotten underway.

I took the earlier photo of the former Ampex building from across Broadway (and the photo of 510 Broadway was taken from the building’s parking lot some time ago, before construction got underway). From the end of Douglas Avenue it is easier to see the demolition of the parking lots in the rear, where the new parking garage will be constructed:

Note the parking garage for the existing medical center visible beyond where the demolition is taking place; the new parking garage should look at lot like the existing one, and, like that one, will stand alongside Highway 101.

Currently what appears to be a large drill is positioned in the vicinity of one of the corners of the new parking garage. While a tool like this may ultimately be used to drill holes for pilings to support the new garage, it seems too early for that. More likely, it is drilling core samples so that the soil beneath can be tested for contaminants.

This should be an interesting project to watch, and yet another that will require the use of a tower crane — which of course won’t be erected until demolition is complete and some foundation work (including construction of the heavy anchors that will support that tower crane) has been done. I’ll be keeping an eye on the project, and if you enjoy watching heavy construction, you may want to, too.

As I stated earlier, to get to the Stanford Health Care project site I had to walk through Redwood City’s Industrial – Light (Incubator) area. I walked down Broadway, which bisects the Incubator blocks between Woodside Road and Douglas Avenue, the latter of which marks the beginning of Stanford’s property. A half-block before, though, is Mills Way, a short cul-de-sac that runs from Broadway to just shy of Highway 101. I wandered down Mills, and was fascinated to discover that Redwood City seems to be incubating a robotics company called Serve Robotics. Like some of the companies located in the Incubator area, the company’s name isn’t on their building, but a bit of Internet digging revealed it. So just what caught my attention? This:

Serve Robotics is developing and selling self-driving “sidewalk delivery” robots, most of which seem to be used for the delivery of food. Uber Eats, for instance, has been using these robots for some of its food deliveries in select LA locations, and is now expanding its fleet to up to 2,000 of these little guys. I just happened to go by when one of the engineers was testing a robot out on the street: he was causing it to bump up and down a curb. He then took it into the parking lot behind their building, where as you can see, Serve has constructed a dedicated testing area where the autonomous robots can be observed dealing with a variety of street and sidewalk conditions.

Continuing along Mills Way to the end, I came to the headquarters of Carbon, Inc., a venture-backed “3D printing technology company helping businesses to develop better products and bring them to market in less time.” You may have seen their headquarters from the freeway, since the company name is proudly emblazoned on that side of the building. Carbon appears to make industrial 3D printers and some of the resins used by those machines to print products for companies such as Adidas, Ford, and Becton Dickinson.

Back out on Broadway, next door to Serve Robotics, I discovered eigen Therapeutics:

Headquartered in the unassuming little one-story building you see above, eigen Therapeutics is developing “co-therapies that mark cancer cells and unmark healthy cells by modulating the expression of their targets.” They’re working to improve existing targeted cancer therapies, develop new ones, and make them available for a wider range of cancers. While I can’t tell you anything about how they are doing what they are doing — I took chemistry and physics in school, but I managed to skip biology —  particularly as one who has been treated for a serious melanoma (thanks, Stanford!), I’m all for companies like this that are advancing medical science and improving outcomes.

With heavy industrial operations out in the Port of Redwood City, it makes a lot of sense to designate a portion of the city for light industrial companies. And having a subset of that set aside for companies that are just getting started — and thus that need smaller, relatively inexpensive spaces in which to work — also makes a great deal of sense. The area itself is rather nondescript, and with the exception of some activities like robot training, you aren’t likely to see activities that give away the great work that is going on behind the doors and darkened windows of the area’s buildings. However, know that a broad range of new technologies are being incubated — developed — in this four-block section of Redwood City, technologies that have the potential to greatly improve our daily lives.