Redwood City, the oldest municipality in San Mateo County, is the county seat.

Redwood City became one of the first population centers on the Peninsula to thrive, thanks largely to the 1851 discovery of a deep-water channel off San Francisco Bay. The port that followed - and is still active today - was used to export the lumber that gave the city and port its names.

More than 150 years later, Redwood City was near the epicenter of the dot-com boom, which brought with it a new wave of development.

That combination of old and new is what gives Redwood City its charm.

Some residents are drawn to neighborhoods with quaint tree-lined streets and Victorian-era dwellings while others prefer modern developments such as Redwood Shores.

Even with a relatively large population of about 73,000 residents, the city has retained its small-town feel.

City officials are trying to cultivate that small-town appeal while pushing ahead with new housing and commercial developments.

In October, a city celebration christened a revamped downtown featuring the new On Broadway cinema-retail complex anchored by a 20-screen movie theater.

Across the theater, the city just finished restoring the 1910 facade of the historic County Courthouse and built an Italian-style plaza to help draw crowds to downtown.

Leaders are also focused on developing housing projects downtown to foster a vibrant, neighborhood feel in the economic and symbolic heart of the city.

But the city is still considering housing developments elsewhere, including the Peninsula Park proposal along the Bayfront.

Peninsula Park would build nearly 800 houses plus parks and trails, and is a scaled-down version of the ambitious, multi-tower Marina Shores Village plan that voters struck down in 2004.

The city's largest employer is Oracle Corp., which provides about 8,000 jobs, according to the Redwood City/San Mateo County Chamber of Commerce.

Oracle is one of the surviving vestiges of the dot-com bust that left some of the city's business parks empty.

However, a recent strong demand for office space from growing technology companies is starting to fill up those sites again.

Drug developer PDL BioPharma Inc., for instance, is relocating its headquarters from Fremont to Redwood City next year and has leased 450,000 square feet at the Pacific Shores Center on Seaport Boulevard.

Redwood City's second-largest employer is San Mateo County with 2,200 jobs. The city serves as the county seat.

Because of a solid employment base, Redwood City residents enjoy some of the shorter commutes in the Bay Area with an average of 25 minutes, according to the 2000 Census.

It helps that Redwood City is located exactly halfway between two of the Peninsula's main employment centers, San Francisco and San Jose.

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