The ribbon gets cut this Saturday. For two years, that has been the sentence everyone in Foster City has been waiting to say about the building at 650 Shell Boulevard, and now it's true. The city's own announcement confirms a ribbon cutting and building dedication ceremony on September 19, roughly two years after crews broke ground on the replacement for the old William E. Walker Recreation Center.
Here's the part that will surprise anyone circling that date on a calendar and picturing a Saturday afternoon coffee at the new lagoon-side café: the café may not be pouring yet. Neither may the ceramics studio. The city didn't even open its request for proposals to run those two spaces, plus an early education classroom, until February 24 of this year, with applications due March 20 and City Council approval scheduled for sometime this summer. A finished building and an operating vendor are two different milestones, and Foster City is about to hit the first one without necessarily hitting the second.
That gap matters more than it sounds like it should, because it explains something about how this neighborhood actually recovers from disruption. The shell comes back on a construction schedule. The life inside it comes back on a leasing schedule. Those two clocks rarely tick at the same speed, and the last two years at the lagoon are a good demonstration of why.
What Actually Closed, and for How Long
The old rec center closed in August 2024, right after that year's Summer Days festival, for a full teardown and rebuild. It was pushing 50 years old, with structural problems, water leakage, and emergency shelter accommodations that had been flagged as inadequate since at least 2016. The city handed the job to BHM Construction, with Griffin Structures managing the project and Group 4 Architecture on design, for a total contract of $45.7 million.
Construction moved the way public construction moves: foundation and steel through the first half of 2025, a topping-off ceremony on July 29, 2025, when the final beam went up to mark the vertical frame's completion, then a long stretch of enclosure and interior work that ran into this year. As of a May 2026 staff report, permanent power from PG&E had just been connected. Senior Engineer Justin Lai told the City Council what that unlocks in practical terms.
With permanent power in place, crews can "start conditioning and doing a lot of the testing required to really occupy the building."
That's a narrower claim than "the building is open." It's the difference between a structure that photographs like it's finished and one the city is actually cleared to hand over to the public, with a functioning café inside it.
Two Summers of Working Around a Fence
If you've lived here through the last two Julys, you already know the shorthand. Fireworks got canceled both years, replaced by a shorter daytime program on the Fourth: a Rotary Club pancake breakfast, live music, and the Family and Dog Parade, wrapped up by 4 p.m. If you've moved to Foster City in the last three years, that compressed version may be the only Fourth you've known here.
Everything else adapted around the construction fence instead of pausing for it. Off the Grid's Wednesday night food truck market at Leo Ryan Park kept its regular run, back on the calendar April 1 this year and going through October, 5 to 9 p.m., with the one break being August 12 so the lawn could be prepped for Summer Days. Kiddos ChuChu, the trackless train that loops the west end of the park near the Metro Shopping Center, kept its May 2 through October 31 season. Summer Days itself happened August 14 through 16, with Mercy and the Heartbeats headlining the amphitheater on Friday, a 60-plus vendor SJMADE marketplace on Saturday, and a Rubber Ducky Scavenger Hunt swapped in for the usual duck race because the construction footprint didn't leave room for the original format.
None of that stopped. It just carried more weight than it used to, because the anchor building that would normally absorb some of that daytime foot traffic, indoor programming, and bad-weather backup space wasn't there.
The Grocery Store That Beat the Rec Center
While the public side of the lagoon worked through a two-year public bidding and construction timeline, the private side across town moved at a completely different pace. Edgewater Place Shopping Center lost its longtime Lucky supermarket, and within roughly a year the space had a new tenant: Osaka Marketplace, a Japanese specialty grocery run by Kazuhiro Takeda, opened its doors at 919 Edgewater Boulevard on December 12, 2025. It brought a Sakura Sushi Buffet, a Kobe Melonpan Bakery, an Asian deli counter, and a hot buffet, and it joined a plaza that already had Ritha Indian Restaurant, Rickshaw Corner, and Warehouse Buffet.
That's the contrast worth sitting with. A private landlord signed a grocery tenant and had it open for business in about a year, start to finish. A public recreation building, arguably a simpler use case on paper, took two full years and is still finishing its vendor selection for a coffee counter and a pottery kiln room. Neither pace is wrong. They're just not the same pace, and it's worth remembering that the next time a "coming soon" sign goes up somewhere in this neighborhood, because the type of tenant behind that sign tells you almost as much as the sign itself about how long the wait will actually be.
There's a smaller version of this playing out again right now. The city has a Preliminary Review application on file for a roughly 6,000-square-foot outdoor pavilion with three restaurant and retail kiosks at Century Plaza, on the southwest corner of Foster City Boulevard and E. Hillsdale. It's early, unapproved, and worth watching rather than planning around, but if it moves forward it would put a small dining cluster within walking distance of both the new Community Center and the Summer Days event footprint.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
The lagoon doesn't wait for any of this to sort itself out. A few things worth marking down regardless of what's happening at 650 Shell Boulevard:
- September 19 — Ribbon cutting and building dedication ceremony for the new Foster City Community Center. Expect speeches and a first look at the finished building. Expect the café and ceramics studio to still be finding their footing.
- Wednesdays through October — Off the Grid at Leo Ryan Park, 5 to 9 p.m., rotating food trucks and live music in the meadow.
- Through October 31 — Kiddos ChuChu keeps running its loop near the Metro Shopping Center.
- October 4 — The Water Lantern Festival returns to Leo J. Ryan Park, gates at 5 p.m., lantern launch between 8 and 9. It's run by an outside organizer, not the city, so registration happens on the event's own site.
- November 7 and 8 — Head of the Lagoon, the annual rowing regatta hosted by Redwood Scullers and the Peninsula Aquatic Junior Crew, takes over the lagoon's 5-kilometer course. Masters and singles race Saturday, juniors race Sunday. It's a spectator event by design, and the lagoon's shape, protected from wind and free of powerboat traffic, makes it one of the better vantage points on the Peninsula to watch a race up close.
None of those four things depend on a vendor contract getting signed. They're proof the neighborhood's actual rhythm, the one built around the water rather than around any single building, never really stopped.
The Building Everyone's Actually Waiting For
The honest read on September 19 is that it closes one chapter and opens a slower one. The structure is done. The senior and youth spaces, the playground, the outdoor areas along the lagoon, all of that becomes usable roughly on schedule. But a rec center isn't really a rec center until the café has a line at 8 a.m. and the ceramics studio's seventeen pottery wheels are booked out for a session. Those pieces are still working through their own city approval process, and given how the last round of public timelines has gone, the fair expectation is a full, functioning building sometime in the months after the ribbon gets cut, not the same weekend.
That means the first lagoon summer with a completely restored Community Center, café, ceramics classes, early education program, and all, is more likely to be 2027 than this fall. This September is the preview. The full return is still a season away.
For everyone who's watched this stretch of Shell Boulevard go from fenced construction site to finished building over the past two years, that's still worth showing up for on Saturday. Just don't plan your morning around the coffee.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near the lagoon, or just want a neighbor's read on how Foster City is changing block by block, Suzanne Garcia has been tracking the Peninsula long enough to know the difference between a ribbon cutting and a return to normal. Let's connect.
