Downtown & Central, San Mateo Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

Downtown San Mateo grew from the depot. The city's 2026 historic context statement says that after the railroad arrived in the 1860s, business moved from the old stage road toward the tracks, starting along Main Street and Railroad Avenue, with B Street, one block west of the station, growing into a major thoroughfare. Fires in 1880, 1883 and 1887 cleared many early wooden buildings, and by 1897 brick and stone blocks lined B Street and Railroad Avenue. The city's first residential subdivision lay just east of the tracks, from San Mateo Creek south to 5th Avenue and east to Eldorado Street, part of today's Central neighborhood.

After the 1906 earthquake the core rebuilt and spread along B Street from Baldwin to 4th Avenue. In 1924, 3rd Avenue was widened to 80 feet to link El Camino Real with the station, and the San Mateo Theater (1925) and Benjamin Franklin Hotel (1927) went up along it. Survivors from the era include the 1923 Beaux Arts bank building at 164 South B Street, the U.S. Main Post Office building on South Ellsworth Avenue and the Hotel St. Matthew on 2nd Avenue, all on the National Register. In 1993 the city made the blocks around South B Street and 3rd Avenue its Downtown Historic District, still its only locally designated district.

The city bought a 16.3-acre private estate in 1922 for its first municipal park, and the park's gates date to the estate's mansion. The Japanese Garden inside, designed by Nagao Sakurai, was completed around 1966, and the city's tennis courts sit above a parking garage built in 1964 and 1965. The city's 2009 Downtown Area Plan set the current direction: a pedestrian-scale core with more housing, and voters' 2024 Measure T allows more height and housing density mainly downtown and near transit.