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Renovation Proposal Would Restore Historic Sequoia Hotel By Janet McGovern Alyn T. Beals realized a dream about 10 years ago when he became one of the owners of a building he’d admired since he was a small boy. Riding in Redwood City’s Fourth of July Parade past the Sequoia Hotel, the child—and future commercial contractor—told the grown-ups in the car that someday he’d like to own the place. Beals got that wish all right, along with one of the biggest challenges in his 53 years in construction. In late February, the partnership he and his wife Dani Gasparini manage presented the city with a proposal to redevelop the 109-year-old city landmark, currently a single-room-occupancy hotel. They’d keep the exterior, build a supporting structure inside it, and add a basement and four new floors above, plus a restaurant, wine room and rooftop terrace and bar. All on a 100-by-100-foot square footprint. “It’s complicated,” Beals says. “It’s almost like building in Manhattan or building in downtown San Francisco. It’s tight quarters.” That’s just the engineering and construction elements of the project, which will also involve obtaining two critical variances, providing relocation assistance to the hotel’s 17 current residents—and riding the economic waves as corporate life and travel patterns shift in a post-Covid environment. Whither Corporate Travel? “Now you can’t fill rooms,” says Beals, who knows whereof he speaks, having built a hotel in Sunnyvale 35 years ago. “So the big challenge is, where’s corporate travel going to be in three years?
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“And by the same token (with) the office market in flux, there’s so many questions right now,” he continues. “They’ll be answered as we go through the process.” He grew up in Redwood City the son of San Francisco 49er Alyn Beals, who had moved the family to town in 1949 and then, along with his wife, got very involved in community life. The football celebrity, who got into real estate, joined the Kiwanis Club and served for decades on the Parks and Recreation Commission. Betty Beals was PTA president at Lincoln School, where “Little Al” attended. One year, father and son got to ride in the Independence Day Parade in the back seat of an antique Cadillac driven by Bob Frank, a local attorney who owned the hotel. Beals remembers his long-ago real estate epiphany this way: “We went by the Sequoia Hotel, and Bob said, ‘Little Al. This is my hotel.’ And I looked at it and I said something like, ‘Well I’d like to own it someday.’” CEO of the Beals Martin, Inc. commercial contracting company he co-founded in 1973, Beals for all those years kept inquiring about the Sequoia Hotel. When it became available after Frank’s death, representatives of the family trust offered it to him, according to Gasparini. The couple assembled a group of investor friends for the
Sequoia Main LLC. (Mayor Diane Howard and her husband, Steve, at one time were part of the partnership but have sold their interest. Six partners remain, Beals and Gasparini the largest single owners and the managing partners.) Beals was determined that the property should be restored and redeveloped as a luxury hotel. A first-class hotel, in fact, is how the Sequoia Hotel presented itself when the doors of the grand establishment opened to guests in 1913. Every two rooms had a bath with hot and cold running water, and there were public restrooms on every floor. At least three comfortable parlors offered space for meetings and social events. The city designated the hotel a historic landmark in 1981, as the only survivor of a grand era “when several impressive hotels graced the area around Main and Broadway.” Impressive it is no more, but the architects have presented concepts designed to regain that long-lost cachet. Raising the Roof An additional four stories would rise above the three-story hotel, which currently has 53 rooms. That number would increase to 82 and the total square footage to 71,500. The concept allows for retail on the ground floor, a restaurant and a bar, as