Shedding light on Redwood City’s home history

Redwood City resident Janet McGovern has coordinated several speaker series shedding light on the city’s history for its yearlong sesquicentennial celebration.

Having seen other events focused on the city’s role in the region’s education and courts system bring history to life for attendees earlier this year, McGovern is hoping this event will delve into the history of a topic to which any resident can relate.

By inviting John Shroyer, a Redwood City Realtor; Sandy Nathan, the daughter of a major Bay Area home builder; and Don Warren, a developer of Redwood Shores; to share their experiences with various neighborhoods and pieces of the city’s history, McGovern is hoping residents will have a view into what those forming Redwood City’s neighborhoods saw years ago.

“To be able to hear from these three people who are directly involved and know so much, it should just be very interesting and informative and fun,” she said.

Shroyer is planning to cover a period of the city’s history predating the city’s incorporation in 1867 to the 1920s, spanning a time when early residents created homesteads on land near the Port of Redwood City in the hopes of later owning it. A series of legal battles in the 1850s put the land in the hands of Simon Monserrat Mezes, said Shroyer. Mezes then subdivided his land, which included Redwood City, and asked those “squatting” on his property to purchase it from him, a process that spurred the creation of the city’s first maps and streets.

For Shroyer, a history enthusiast, sharing what he’s learned from years of poring over books and maps from different periods in the city’s history comes naturally. He’s hoping those attending the event enjoy thinking about what the city looked like when its residents were more dependent on resources like the port or nearby forests for their livelihoods.

“I think people get a kick out of what used to be and what is now,” he said. “Knowing where I live and what used to be, to me, it just makes it a more interesting place to live.”

For Nathan, thinking about how and why certain home styles came to be can serve as a sign of the times. She said her father, Andy Oddstad, was inspired to build sturdy, affordable homes for Bay Area residents having grown up in a family with few means during the Great Depression. Oddstad’s homes are prominent in the Farm Hill neighborhood, where the structures he and his team of architects and builders constructed became homes for families who moved into the city’s hillier neighborhoods after World War II.

“The special thing about Oddstad homes is they’re well designed and they’re tough,” she said. “You can remodel [them] all you want.”

On drives through the neighborhood, Nathan has taken pride in the fact that many of the homes her father built still stand some 60 years later. In her research of her father’s work, which includes building thousands of homes across the Bay Area, Nathan has come to appreciate why homeowners maintain structures emblematic of certain time periods.

Warren said he is looking forward to the event and revisiting Redwood Shores, a large section of Bayside land he helped develop into what he calls a town within a city. Warren remembers the long road to making the 1,400-acre community into the neighborhood full of offices, homes and recreational spaces it is today, as well as the unique partnership between the city and his development team that he credits with making Redwood Shores’ development possible.

“I had the opportunity to stay with Redwood Shores from the very beginning to the very end,” he said. “That in and of itself was a very unique experience.”

“From Squatters to Suburbs: The Story of Redwood City’s Neighborhoods” will be held 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 23, at Peninsula Covenant Church, 3560 Farm Hill Blvd.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

(650) 344-5200 ext. 102