The 1960s Wing Hiding Alexandria's City Hall Comes Down This Month

For most of this year, the fence around 301 King Street told you nothing. Crews were behind it, work was happening, but from the sidewalk it looked like a construction site standing still. That changes this month. A high-reach demolition excavator has moved onto the plaza, and it is taking down the 1960s addition to City Hall one section at a time.

Here is the part that gets lost in the shorthand: the story residents have been repeating all year, that the Saturday farmers market moved and the garage closed, was never the real headline. That was the warm-up. The actual event is that for the first time since 1961, more of Alexandria's original 1871 City Hall building is about to be visible than at any point in the last six and a half decades. And it is happening later than the city first said it would.

What You'll Actually See This Fall

The quiet phase is over. According to the city's own construction update, posted at the start of September, residents and business owners near the site can expect a specific set of changes over the coming weeks:

• A demolition excavator working the plaza in sections, not an all-at-once teardown
• Increased truck traffic on the approved haul route as debris comes out
• Continued fencing and pedestrian detours around the King, Royal, Fairfax, and Cameron block
• Noise during permitted construction hours, tied to a schedule the city has posted online

None of that is hazardous material work. The asbestos abatement in the 1960s section, which is what kept things invisible behind the fence all spring and summer, is finished. What's coming down now is standard demolition debris, cleared for removal.

The Building Under the Building

To understand why this milestone matters, you have to know what's actually behind that fence. Alexandria's City Hall was designed by Adolph Cluss and built between 1871 and 1873, a Second Empire building with a central pavilion, a mansard-roofed dome, and a replica of the clock tower Benjamin Henry Latrobe designed for the 1817 town hall that burned in the same spot. It's one of Virginia's boldest examples of the style, and it landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

What most people walking past today don't register is that the building they see isn't just the 1871 structure. In the early 1960s, architects Robert Willgoos and Dwight Chase filled in the U-shaped courtyard behind the original building with a Colonial Revival addition. That expansion required removing several of the original cast iron columns from the central pavilion, leaving only ten standing where more once supported the space. The plaza out front, the one everyone associates with Market Square, wasn't added until 1967, as part of an urban renewal project that turned the market grounds into an open landscape with a fountain.

So the block you know is really three eras stacked on top of each other: the 1871 Cluss building, the 1961 infill that quietly ate part of the original courtyard, and the 1967 plaza that gave the whole thing its familiar public face. The current project takes down the middle layer. That's what "clears the way for new construction while the 1871 structure is preserved and restored" means in practice. It isn't a teardown of City Hall. It's the removal of the piece that's been sitting inside it for 65 years.

Why It's Running Behind Schedule

If you'd been tracking the announced timeline, you'd expect this to be wrapping up, not starting. The original plan called for construction running from 2026 through 2028. That's no longer accurate.

Crews working through the 1960s section this year found asbestos in places the original survey hadn't flagged, specifically in the south facade and in the east and west interior courtyards. Addressing that unforeseen material pushed the schedule back ten weeks. The city now expects the full project, covering the 118,000 square foot City Hall building and the roughly 90,000 square foot Market Square Plaza and garage below it, to wrap in fall 2028 rather than sometime in 2028 more loosely defined.

The numbers behind it are public. The project sits inside Alexandria's 2025 through 2034 Capital Improvement Program at $123.6 million, with an $85 million construction contract awarded to Grunley Construction. It's also the first project in the city to run under a project labor agreement, signed with the Baltimore-DC Metro Building and Construction Trades Council in September 2025. None of that changes what you'll see on your walk this week, but it explains why the fence isn't coming down anytime soon.

The Saturday Routine, Slightly Rerouted

The disruption most residents have already adjusted to is the farmers market. It's worth restating plainly, because the two changes get conflated and they aren't the same thing.

The market has run at Market Square continuously since 1753, which makes this the first relocation in its history. The Market Square Garage itself closed to the public on February 9, and with it went the parking many longtime shoppers used out of habit. The move is genuinely just across the street, but if your Saturday muscle memory still points you toward the old plaza, this is the year it steers you wrong.

What's Filling In Around the Fence

While the demolition work reshapes the block itself, the streets just north of it have been filling in with new places that change how the same walk feels once you're past the construction. The Commodore, a bar concept with an established following in D.C.'s Dupont Circle, opened in March at 220 N. Lee Street in the former Mystic BBQ space, a few blocks north of the fenced site. Further up, the Carr Properties residential building at 425 Montgomery Avenue is bringing in both For Five Coffee and Grazie Nonna, an Italian American concept making its first stop in Virginia. Floriana, the longtime Dupont Circle Italian restaurant, opened its Old Town location inside the Atrium building this summer, with a full breakfast, brunch, and dinner service that puts it in different territory than the dinner-only Italian rooms already in the neighborhood.

That matters this particular month because the fall calendar gives residents plenty of reasons to walk through all of it at once. Alexandria Oktoberfest lands at John Carlyle Square on September 19, and the Fall Wine Festival at George Washington's Mount Vernon runs October 9 through 11. Neither event requires passing City Hall, but for anyone heading downtown for dinner beforehand or drinks after, the route now runs past a fenced demolition site on one end and a stretch of new openings on the other. The map you knew a year ago has genuinely different anchors on it now.

The Long View

About two more years of fencing and phased work isn't a small thing to live next to, and the ten week delay already on the books is a reminder that a project this size rarely moves exactly on schedule. But the piece worth paying attention to right now isn't the delay. It's that for a window this fall, before the new infill construction goes up and closes the view again, more of the original 1871 building than any Alexandrian under the age of 85 has ever seen is briefly out in the open. Worth a slower walk past the fence while it lasts.

If you're thinking about what a changing block like this means for property values, timing, or your own next move in Old Town, that's a longer conversation, and one Hanna Abebe is glad to have when you're ready. Let's Connect.