“Historic” “downtown” Foster City
On my scenic trip to lively “downtown” “Foster City” I had the eerie feeling that I was in an old Sim City game, especially surveying the wide streets and chunky grey buildings from above. Three colors: grey, green, and blue for water… really like a toy. It’s so clean and shiny and planned that I get the heebie-jeebies. Irvine, in Orange County in Southern California, was a lot like that.
I wonder why planned communities don’t allow for a little more variance and organic, messy development? So that the city would feel more human and less like a suspiciously dystopian space colony?
Foster City was built in 1958-1964 from Brewer’s Island, a levee-protected dairy farm and salt pond, and a bunch of sludge dredged from the Bay and the island’s central lagoon. The system of lagoons, which hold 425 million gallons, allow water to be pumped in and out of the island’s central basin. I had no idea that 30,000 people live there. Yikes!
We enjoyed walking around the central downtown with its giant police station, fire department, senior center, and office buildings that had all been blockily extruded from the spinnerets of an enormous concrete spider… the lagoon and fountains and trees were pretty, though also suffering from leaf-polishing syndrome, as if armies of zombies buffed them gently every night, removing stray twigs & squaring all the corners of the lonely begonias. With happy illegality we fed a package of saltines to the problematic, lagoon-polluting seagulls and ducks.
…and, home of one of the best dim sum places in the Bay Area: ABC Seafood! Next to the Safeway in that minimall.
erf. i dont like that dim sum place. but the new indian place tabla is excellent
My dad helped build FC in the 50’s. Foster City was built on landfill over the bay making it a difficult job site. The company that he worked with put in the water and sewer pipes. He said it was like trying to dig in wet sand. As soon as he would pull a big bucket of the soil up, workers in the ditch would have to jam boards down in an attempt to keep the sides up. They would try to lay the next pipe in quickly. One afternoon the hole collapsed in on a worker. He was completely buried. My dad dropped the bucket of his machine down into the ditch as gently as he could, and saying a prayer lifted the unconscious worked up, and out. The worked recovered, but my dad was shook up for awhile. After the project was finished my dad said that he would never set foot there again.
Joann, that’s fascinating! I was just reading about the difficult construction process, and how after the island itself was built, the lagoon and a lott of pumping helped to dry out the new land.
Here’s some earthquake liquefaction zone maps and other info – and more here on mitigation and retrofitting by the city, that has in theory been improving the situation.
I can’t say I’m a big fan of that dim sum place either. Minnie, do you have other suggestions?
I have to say I haven’t been for about 3 years. What I was most impressed with were the live fish. I also get tired of Koi Palace.. there are other places, etc.
It’s worth a few minutes to drive the extra few exits down 101 to Ming’s on Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto for seriously wonderful dim sum on the Peninsula. Just on the water side of the freeway.
http://www.mings.com/