History

What is now Central Park’s eastern border was once the distant southern border of Redwood City, a full mile from downtown. It contained Union Cemetery, the first cemetery association in California, where the town’s original settlers were buried. It also included “Five Points,” a rowdy collection of tanneries, saloons and boardinghouses serving workers from Woodside’s lumber camps. “Respectable” Redwood City residents steered clear of the neighborhood, whose name came from the intersection of El Camino, Main Street, Woodside Road, Redwood Avenue and Spruce Street, especially when its notorious saloons, including the Fly Trap Inn, roared merrily through Prohibition without any noticeable dip in sales.

Five Points came to an end in the early 1960s with the construction of the Woodside Road overpass. By then, the neighborhood was already changing. Five Points’ rowdy streets were evolving. The tanneries and boardinghouses were gone, replaced by rows of modest ranch-style houses and low-rise apartment buildings. By the time the Woodside Road overpass was completed, the new, “respectable” neighborhood of Palm Park was almost completely built-out, save for some points at its western edge, where a few nurseries clung to live along Valota Road and Kentfield Avenue.

Valota is the boundary between Palm Park and Woodside Plaza, the neighborhood making up the western half of Central Park. By the early 1960s, Woodside Plaza, too, was bustling. Its development boomed, in fact, a decade earlier; so much so that by 1953, the first businesses, a gas station and a Lucky food store, had opened at the shopping center at the corner of Woodside Road and Massachusetts Avenue. The name of the center: Woodside Plaza.