Costantini Team | Bay Area, CA Real Estate Experts

On December 23, 2022, the family behind State of Mind Public House and Pizzeria posted to Instagram that Christmas had come early. They had just soft-opened their third restaurant in a stretch of Redwood City most drivers on Marsh Road wouldn't think to call a destination: a parking lot at Marsh Road and Florence Street, in the space where a diner called Squeeze In used to serve breakfast before it quietly closed for good.

Friendly Acres doesn't have a Main Street. It has a shopping center one family has owned since Eisenhower's second term, and the tenant list inside it has been rewritten enough times that tracking the changes tells you more about how this neighborhood actually lives than any list of parks or school boundaries could.

Built in 1959, Still Owned by the Builder's Family

Marsh Manor Shopping Center went up in stages. Contractor and developer Richard Delucchi opened the first phase in January 1959 in an early California ranch style, anchored by a Marsh Manor market, a Marsh Manor cleaners, and a Marsh Manor liquor company, with a Shell station on the corner that was later torn down. A second wing followed in 1960 with a pharmacy, a beauty salon, a barber shop, a shoe repair counter, a fountain restaurant, a launderette, and a bakery. By April 1969 Delucchi had built a new 16,000-square-foot market on the north end of the property, half again larger than the original grocery store.

That market went through names the way strip malls do. It became Busy Boy Market in the 1980s, then Key Market for two decades. What makes Marsh Manor unusual isn't the churn of grocery brands. It's who kept signing the leases underneath them. Richard Delucchi's daughter, Dorine Secrest, and her husband Jerry still own and run the center. When Key Market's lease expired in September 2014, the family didn't bring in an outside grocery chain. They opened their own store, Delucchi's Market, in the same spot, named for the man who built the place.

The Turnover That Looks Like Loss and Isn't

A shopping center changing hands every few years usually signals decline. Marsh Manor's record reads the opposite way once you follow it space by space.

Space	Previous tenant	Current tenant	Opened
Former grocery anchor	Key Market (closed 2014)	Delucchi's Market	2014
Former diner space	Squeeze In	State of Mind Public House and Pizzeria	December 2022
Former Chinese restaurant space	Yat Sing	Feast & Floral Wine Bar	October 2024

Each closure got replaced within a year or two by something with more polish, not less. State of Mind's owners, the Smith family, are Peninsula natives who opened their first location in Los Altos in 2018 and a second in Palo Alto in 2020 before Redwood City became their third. Feast & Floral's owner, Ashley Higashi, had been running her catering and floral business out of borrowed kitchens since 2019, including a stint sharing space with a Palo Alto wine bar that later shut down, before she picked Marsh Manor for her own buildout, choosing it because it sat close to where most of her existing customers already lived.

Not every departure ended cleanly. In December 2015, a long-running sandwich shop called Atherton Subs closed after operating in the center since 2004, following a dispute between the owner and the Secrests over lease terms and rent on what the family considered the center's most visible corner. The disagreement made it into the local paper, with the tenant blaming a doubled rent and the owners saying they were holding out for a business that fit their long-term plan for the space rather than renewing on the old terms. Whatever the details, the pattern held. The family that owns Marsh Manor keeps choosing what replaces what leaves, rather than accepting whatever fills a vacancy first.

What's Actually There Now

Walk the center today and the current roster looks like this: Delucchi's Market, Freewheel Brewing Company, Lavender 'n Cream, Los Gallos Taqueria, State of Mind Public House and Pizzeria, Feast & Floral Wine Bar, Starbucks, CorePower Yoga, StretchWorks, K-fit, Future Dental Care, and Bay Area Integrative.

Freewheel Brewing has been the center's anchor bar since 2012, specializing in English-style cask ales and running a Wednesday night pub quiz at 7 p.m. that continues through the fall, along with weekend live bands, open mic nights, and a recurring School of Rock Sunday slot.

This past summer, Thursday evenings from June through August turned the center's central courtyard into a free concert series, with State of Mind bringing pizza out to the patio while local bands played from 6 to 8 p.m. A run of Tuesday evenings added free line-dancing lessons on the same patio, taught by an instructor known locally as Line Dancing Lisa with music from DJ Shivers.

One patron review on the center's own website put the family's approach to tenant turnover this way:

"they work very hard to fill it with another good business"

That's not a marketing line. It's a customer's read on watching the same ownership group make the same call, decade after decade, every time a storefront comes open.

A Center That Belongs to More Than One Neighborhood

Marsh Manor sits close enough to the city line that it functions as a shared anchor rather than a Friendly Acres-only spot. Freewheel Brewing's own neighborhood tags list it as a favorite not just in Friendly Acres and North Fair Oaks but also in Menlo Park's Suburban Park, Belle Haven, and North Fair Oaks-Menlo pockets, plus Atherton's Lindenwood and MPVillas areas, and East Palo Alto's Palo Alto Park.

That spread makes sense once you look at the geography. Friendly Acres itself is largely residential, with a mix of post-war homes, duplexes, and some light industrial parcels near the freeway, the kind of neighborhood built around commuting rather than a commercial core. Marsh Manor sits right at its edge, less than half a mile from the Marsh Road exit off Highway 101, which puts it within easy reach of several neighborhoods at once rather than serving as any single one's private center.

That's the actual shape of the thing. Friendly Acres doesn't lack a downtown because nobody bothered to build one. It has a gathering place that happens to sit at a crossroads, owned continuously by one family since before the interstate even had that exit, still deciding who gets to open a business there next.

Next time you're waiting on a pizza from State of Mind or grabbing flowers from Feast & Floral, take a look at how long some of these businesses have actually been there. It says something about how this stretch of Redwood City works that most of the map doesn't show. If you're curious what else that kind of local detail can tell you about buying or selling nearby, The Costantini Team is happy to talk it through.