Apartment Choice

With the words well cleaned, well pressed and well dressed hovering in three red arrows above its iconic sign, it’s tough for those passing by Broadway Cleaners in Redwood City to miss it. Built specifically for a dry cleaning business some 57 years ago, the building at 1681 Main St. is a fixture standing where the street dead-ends into El Camino Real . It’s now occupied by lifelong dry cleaners Marti and Jim Russell, who have owned and operated a business there for the past six years. An instructor and third- generation dry cleaner , Marti Russell is no stranger to the business. She has fond memories of helping her father, a dry cleaner himself, sort through hangers as a kid and worked in his Belmont shop while she attended San Mateo High School . Though Marti Russell has logged over 50 years in the business, the stories her customers tell her about the items they are dropping off keep her far from bored. “You just can’t make some of this stuff up,” she said. From helping customers...

get elephant's newsletter We gardeners often talk about what plants we would like to grow. Rarely we ask, “What can the garden grow in us?” I began my journey of learning to grow food as a broke post college graduate at the onset of the Great Recession. At the time, I viewed the garden purely as an object to help me save money by growing my own food. Little did I know the garden would grow in me. It is kind of a miracle to plant a seed under dirt. First, you see nothing. And if you are like me, you experience a sense of worry, until one lucky morning, you go outside and see that a baby plant has emerged. Just as the seed has transformed into a plant, there is also an inner transformation that happens through gardening. First, there was not much edible food growing in my garden. My carrot seeds never sprouted, my leafy greens were feeding more aphids and slugs than me, and my blueberry plant caught a disease. Needless to say, I did not save money. But the idea of gardening was s...