"We're right on that same cadence, amazingly, across this entire building's history," Jeremy McPike, Alexandria's director of general services, told residents at a virtual briefing in January. He was explaining why City Hall and the plaza in front of it are now behind construction fencing until sometime in 2028. The building has been substantially rebuilt roughly every sixty years since 1871, and the underground garage now being torn apart opened in 1967. Fifty-nine years later, the city is doing it again.
If you live in Old Town, you have already noticed the fence line around 301 King Street. What you may not have clocked is that the market square in front of it has survived a longer, messier version of exactly this disruption once before, and the record of how that went is the most useful guide available to what the next two years actually look like.
What's Behind the Fence This Month
The visible work right now is not demolition. Since early this year, crews have been installing a support of excavation system, essentially a temporary steel pile wall around the perimeter of the old Market Square garage, to stabilize the ground before the garage underneath comes out. That piling work runs through early fall 2026. Alongside it, contractors finished abatement of asbestos and other materials common in 1960s-era construction, a required step before anyone can start pulling the building apart.
The next thing residents will actually see is the 1960s infill portion of City Hall coming down, the addition built into the historic building's courtyard decades after the original 1871 structure went up. That demolition starts this September. A tower crane goes up in the first quarter of 2027, planted in the footprint of the old garage, and stays for about a year while the new garage and City Hall's replacement structure get built around it. Grunley Construction, the contractor holding an $85 million construction contract on the project, is targeting substantial completion in the third quarter of 2028, though the project's own executive has said the schedule carries built-in time for the unexpected.
The Same Ground, Sixty Years Apart
The 1871 building itself is a rebuild. Architect Adolph Cluss reconstructed it after a fire destroyed the previous City Hall, and the bell tower on top, designed by Benjamin Latrobe, went up in 1817 and has been under structural monitoring since 2014 as part of a decade of patchwork repairs that finally ran out of runway. The garage and plaza now being torn out opened June 3, 1967, built to give the city and its market a permanent home after both had spent the preceding years bouncing around Old Town during urban renewal. During that stretch, the Farmers' Market moved into an empty grocery store, then inside City Hall itself, then onto Cameron Street, before it finally returned to Market Square when the new plaza and garage were finished.
That is the part worth sitting with. The market has operated continuously since 1753, but "continuously" has already survived one full displacement cycle, and the city's own framing of the current project treats this as the second lap of the same sixty-year clock rather than a novel emergency.
Where the Saturday Market Actually Is Now
The market itself did not disappear. It moved across the street, to the 100 block of North Royal Street and the courtyard at Tavern Square, holding its first market at the new site in January 2026. The hours haven't changed: 7 a.m. to noon, every Saturday, rain or shine, with more than 70 vendors selling produce, baked goods, flowers, meat, cheese, and cut flowers, the same mix that's been there for years. The old Market Square garage itself closed on January 17, 2026.
Parking during market hours is still free at two garages within a short walk:
- Tavern Square Garage, 418 Cameron Street
- Courthouse Square Garage, 111 South Pitt Street
Both offer free parking from 6:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturdays specifically for market patrons, which covers the market's full window with a half hour of buffer on each end.
What Changes Around It Through 2028
The construction footprint eliminates parking along roughly three-quarters of the site's perimeter, covering North Royal Street, Cameron Street, and portions of Fairfax Street. Fairfax Street is also the designated haul route for construction trucks, which enter Old Town via I-495 and Route 1 to King Street, access the site from Fairfax, and exit via Cameron to Washington Street. If your regular walk or drive threads through that corridor, expect it to be the busiest stretch of the perimeter for the duration.
Sidewalk access along King Street itself is being preserved for most of the project, but short-term closures of a few weeks will happen during shoring operations and again during final plaza reconstruction. The shared DASH and King Street Trolley stop that used to sit at North Fairfax and King has already been consolidated into a single location and moved more than once for safety, landing near 302 King Street as of this spring. Motorcoach loading shifted to the 400 block of King Street, in front of Tavern Square. If you're walking a visiting relative to a group tour meeting point, it's worth checking with the guide directly rather than assuming last year's corner still applies.
More than 400 city employees have relocated out of City Hall entirely. The offices most residents interact with landed here:
| Office | New Location |
|---|---|
| City Manager, Mayor, City Council | 421 King Street |
| City Clerk, Planning and Zoning | 421 King Street |
| City Attorney | 123 N. Pitt Street and 100 N. Pitt Street |
| In-person Finance/tax payments | 4850 Mark Center Drive |
| City Council chambers | Del Pepper Community Resource Center, 4850 Mark Center Drive |
If you've got a permit question or a tax payment due, the counter you remember at 301 King Street is not where you'll find help anymore.
The Budget Line That Moved Twice
Ask three people what this project costs and you'll likely get three different numbers, and all three could be right. The city's proposed fiscal 2026 capital budget listed $19.3 million for that year's slice of the work. A February 2025 presentation put the project total at $132 million. By the time the city published its proposed FY 2027 through FY 2036 Capital Improvement Program in early 2026, the all-in figure had grown to roughly $165.6 million, covering design, engineering, temporary facilities, project management, and contingency alongside the physical construction. Grunley's own contract, separate from that broader figure, is $85 million specifically for building the thing.
None of those numbers contradict each other. They're measuring different scopes of the same project, which is worth knowing the next time a headline cites one of them as if it were the whole story.
Planning a Saturday Around It
The practical version of all this is simple. Park at Tavern Square or Courthouse Square for the market, arrive knowing the vendors are the same ones who've always been there, and give yourself extra time on Fairfax Street if you're driving through rather than walking. McPike, addressing residents directly at that January briefing, put it plainly when he asked people to keep showing up for the vendors during the transition, since a slower few months for foot traffic is the thing they're most worried about.
The market has already proven it can outlast a longer and less organized version of this exact disruption. The current plan has it back on Market Square, in a rebuilt plaza with the accessibility and shade the current one lacks, sometime in the third quarter of 2028, sixty-one years after the doors first opened on the version now coming down.
If you want the next update on parking changes, sidewalk closures, or anything else shifting around Market Square before it hits the news, The LizLuke Team is tracking the project the same way we track everything else in this neighborhood. Reach out and we'll keep you posted.
