Living in San Mateo

Neighborhoods — The corridor

Hillsdale, San Mateo

The second downtown. A mall from 1954, a rebuilt elevated rail station, and the blocks of ranch houses that came with them.

Hillsdale Shopping Center under heavy overcast at dusk, seen across the road from behind a pedestrian railing, with palms and a Macy's sign
Seen from the pedestrian side of the road, which is new. The mall came first, in 1954. Everything else in Hillsdale was arranged around it.

On the map

On the slope

Elevation cross section of San Mateo, west to east: the Crystal Springs watershed at 560 feet falls to San Francisco Bay at sea level in roughly four miles. San Mateo Highlands — 310 ft Laurelwood & Sugarloaf — 330 ft Baywood — 130 ft Aragon — 90 ft North Central — 38 ft Downtown — 28 ft Hillsdale — 22 ft Bay Meadows — 14 ft Sunnybrae — 11 ft Shoreview & Fiesta Gardens — 8 ft Coyote Point & North Shoreview — 5 ft
The hills South-central, on the flat side of the corridor. The Bay Drag toward the Bay →
Elevation
22 ft
Band
The corridor
Nearest platform
Hillsdale
Getting to it
5–20 minutes depending which side
Street pattern
Postwar curves west of El Camino, straight grid east
Fog
Rare
Tree canopy
Moderate — grown-in on the residential blocks, none over the arterials
Noise
Hillsdale Boulevard and El Camino; the elevated station removed the grade crossings

Hillsdale is the least romantic address in San Mateo and the one where the arithmetic works, and those two facts are the same fact. A single-storey house, a usable yard, an express-stop train platform, and both freeways in under ten minutes, for less than the slope charges for trees. What it costs is charm. Nothing here makes a visitor say anything.

It is what the Peninsula built in the 1950s: a large shopping center surrounded by tract housing, on land that was a dairy and a racetrack before that. Hillsdale Shopping Center opened in 1954 and has been remodeled roughly every fifteen years since; it remains the place people from three cities go to buy a mattress or see a movie.

The neighborhood around it is single-story ranch houses on regular lots, well kept, with wide streets and generous setbacks. West of El Camino the blocks curve; east of it they run straight to 101.

The recent change is the station. Hillsdale Caltrain was rebuilt and elevated a few years ago and moved a few blocks north, which took the tracks out of the street grid and made the whole 25th-to-31st corridor work differently. The grade separation is the largest quality-of-life improvement in this part of San Mateo in decades, and nobody talks about it, because good infrastructure is invisible.

What it's actually like

Convenient and slightly generic. Everything is close: groceries, the mall, the train, both freeways. Nothing is charming in the way B Street is charming. The houses are practical, the yards are usable, and the streets are safe to bike on away from Hillsdale Boulevard itself.

Beresford Park and the recreation center carry the neighborhood's public life — fields, a playground, and the courts and rooms everyone books.

Getting out

By train, Hillsdale is a heavier-service station than Hayward Park, and the elevated platforms serve both the Bay Meadows and the mall sides. The grade separation removed the at-grade crossings that used to divide the neighborhood.

By bike, the residential streets are calm and safe away from Hillsdale Boulevard itself, and separated lanes on 28th Avenue toward the station are in design.

On foot, groceries, the mall, and the platform are all inside five to twenty minutes depending which side of El Camino the address sits on. Hillsdale Boulevard itself is the crossing to plan around rather than improvise.

By car, 92 is two minutes away and connects to both 101 and 280, which is priced in.