"Now that we have permanent power, the team is able to start conditioning and doing a lot of the testing required to really occupy the building." That's Foster City Senior Engineer Justin Lai, describing the state of the new Community Center in a May 2026 update carried by the San Mateo Daily Journal. Read that sentence twice. It is not "the building is open." It is a building that can finally run its own systems well enough to find out if it's ready.
If you walked the lagoon path during Summer Days two weeks ago, on August 14 through 16, the building looked done. Solar panels installed, cladding up, no fencing in the sightline for the first time since 2024. That's the version most residents will remember: the summer the park stopped looking like a job site. But if you tried to book that same building for a birthday party or a class this week, you'd have hit a page on the city's own site that still reads, as of this writing, that reservations for the rental space aren't being accepted yet, with a note to check back. The park reopened. The building hasn't, at least not for you.
What Summer Days Actually Looked Like This Year
This year's festival was the first of its kind since the old William E. Walker Recreation Center closed in August 2024, the Monday after that year's Summer Days wrapped, to make way for demolition. For two summers, the festival ran on a scaled-back version of itself, staged around an active construction footprint. This year it had its full shape back: a classic car show on Shell Boulevard Friday afternoon, an SJMADE-curated marketplace of roughly 90 vendors on the lawn Saturday, food trucks placed by Moveable Feast, a beer-and-wine garden, and a weekend-long Rubber Ducky Scavenger Hunt on the lagoon in place of the races that used to close out the event. Mercy and the Heartbeats headlined the Friday night amphitheater show, doubling as the final date of this year's Summer Concert Series.
Getting there took planning most residents will remember from the road closures alone. Shell Boulevard between East Hillsdale and Bounty Drive, and Balclutha Drive near the PJCC campus, were both closed to through traffic from Thursday morning through Monday. Event parking ran $10 at Parkside Towers, City Hall, and the Century lot at 1065 East Hillsdale, with accessible parking at the Community Center and library lot on the same block. If you live on the interior loop east of Shell, that four-day window is the one to plan grocery runs and airport drops around every August from here forward, since Summer Days now anchors the same weekend each year.
The Building Is Structurally Done. The Reservations Aren't.
Here's the part that gets lost once the festival banners come down. The Foster City Community Center at 650 Shell Boulevard, inside Leo Ryan Park, is a different facility from the older Community Center Annex above the library at 1000 East Hillsdale Boulevard. The Annex kept taking reservations for small weddings and meetings the entire time the park was under construction, since it was never part of the demolition. The new building at Shell Boulevard is the one everyone means when they talk about "the new Community Center," and it's the one still working through startup.
The city issued a Request for Information in February 2026 seeking operators for three specific spaces inside the new building: a café, a ceramics studio, and an early education classroom. Prospective vendors had until March 20 to submit proposals. That's a separate process from construction, and it runs on its own calendar. Practically, it means a few things worth knowing before you assume the building functions the way the old Recreation Center did:
- The café and ceramics studio won't necessarily open the same week the building does. Vendor selection and lease terms still have to clear before either space serves a customer.
- The early education classroom follows the same track, so families hoping to enroll shouldn't expect it to be available on day one.
- The building has also been designated a temporary evacuation shelter, coordinated with the Red Cross and the fire department, which is a use case that doesn't require any of the above to be resolved first.
The total project contract runs around $45.7 million, and by all public accounts the budget has held up well through a process that started with community conversations back around 2016, moved through a pandemic and several budget cycles, and finally broke ground in 2024. The frame went up through 2025. What's left in late August 2026 is the gap between a structure that tests out and a building that's actually open for the public to reserve, and that gap is exactly where things stand right now.
The One Thing That Didn't Come Back
Fireworks are the clearest holdout. For the second July 4th in a row, the city postponed the evening aerial show, citing the same construction-related safety concerns around staging a nighttime crowd at the lagoon. What ran instead was a compressed daytime program ending by 4 p.m.: the Rotary Club pancake breakfast, live music, and the Family & Dog Parade. If you've moved to Foster City in the last two or three years, that daytime version may be the only Fourth you've known here. If you remember the fireworks over the lagoon, the honest read is that the show isn't back yet, and it's tied to the same construction footprint clearing that everything else in this piece is tied to.
The Retail Side Moved Faster Than the Public Side
While the city's own building worked through its startup sequence, the private side of the neighborhood moved on a completely different clock. Osaka Marketplace held its grand opening on December 12, 2025, taking over the former Lucky Supermarket space at 919 Edgewater Boulevard inside the Edgewater Place Shopping Center. At 35,000 square feet, it's the chain's second Bay Area location after its original Fremont store, and it joins a shopping plaza that already includes Rickshaw Corner, Ritha Indian Restaurant, and a Korean barbecue spot, giving that stretch of Edgewater a genuinely different character than it had a year ago. Regular hours settled in at 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily starting December 15, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle around the opening.
A second, smaller change is still pending rather than confirmed. The city's own project list shows a Preliminary Review application for a roughly 6,000-square-foot outdoor pavilion at Century Plaza, on the southwest corner of Foster City Boulevard and East Hillsdale, with three restaurant and retail kiosks inside about 2,000 enclosed square feet. Nothing has been approved yet, but if it moves forward, it would put a small dining cluster within easy walking distance of both the new Community Center and the Summer Days parking lots, according to the city's Major Projects page.
What Never Actually Stopped
Through all of it, one piece of the park calendar didn't skip a beat. The Wednesday Night Food Truck Marketplace at Leo Ryan Park kept its weekly schedule through the entire construction window, with the only interruption being a single pause on August 12 this year so crews could prep the lawn for Summer Days. If you've been timing your Wednesdays around it, that continuity is worth appreciating. It's the one part of this story that never needed a press release to explain what changed, because nothing did.
So where does that leave a resident trying to figure out what "the park is back" actually means today? The festival came back in full. The lagoon path is clear. The food truck nights never left. But the building itself, the one everyone's been waiting two years to walk into, is still finishing the part of the process nobody photographs: getting cleared to actually let you book it.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own property near the lagoon, or you're simply curious how a changing corner of Foster City tends to affect timing and value, Carmen Miranda has spent decades tracking exactly this kind of shift on the Mid-Peninsula. Let's connect.
