Walk down to Market Square this Saturday morning looking for the produce stands and you will find fencing, scaffolding, and a construction trailer where the vendors used to set up. The market itself is one block over, spread across the 100 block of North Royal Street and the courtyard at Tavern Square. It has been there since January, and it will stay there for the better part of three years while the city rebuilds the plaza and the historic building behind it.
What makes this worth more than a passing note is how rarely it has happened. The Old Town Farmers' Market has operated at or immediately around Market Square since 1753, when George Washington was still sending produce down from Mount Vernon to be sold there. In nearly 273 years of continuous operation, it has only been forced off that corner once before, during 1960s urban renewal, when the market bounced between an empty grocery store, the inside of City Hall itself, and a stretch of Cameron Street before settling back into Market Square in 1967. It stayed put there for almost 60 years. Now it has moved again, and the history of the last move is worth knowing before anyone assumes the current arrangement is the whole story.
The market itself did not shrink. More than 70 vendors, selling produce, baked goods, flowers, meat, dairy, and prepared foods, still show up every Saturday from 7 a.m. to noon, rain or shine. The new footprint at North Royal Street and Tavern Square was built to hold up to 100 vendor tent spaces, which means there is more room in the temporary site than the market currently uses. The hours have not changed, the vendor list has not changed, and the market is still a two-minute walk from where it used to be. What changed is the ground underneath it.
The city closed the Market Square garage for the duration of construction, pulling roughly 180 parking spaces out of the middle of Old Town in one move. The city has said the replacement garage's final space count is still being worked out, which is a detail worth sitting with if you are used to circling for a spot near King and Fairfax. In the meantime, Saturday market parking is free from 6:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at two nearby garages: Tavern Square at 418 Cameron Street and Courthouse Square at 111 South Pitt Street. DASH bus routes 30, 31, and 34, along with the Old Town Trolley, also stop within walking distance of the market's new corner.
The 1960s displacement is the closest precedent Old Town has, and it did not resolve in one clean move. Records from that era show the market shifting locations more than once before it found a permanent home back at Market Square in 1967, first landing in a vacant grocery store, then temporarily inside City Hall, then onto Cameron Street. Only after the garage and plaza were rebuilt did the market return to the same ground it had occupied since the 18th century, where it then ran without interruption for nearly six decades.
That history matters here because the current project is being described as a single relocation to North Royal Street and Tavern Square for two to three years. The last comparable disruption did not settle into one temporary spot on the first try. It took several moves and several years before the market found stable footing again. Nobody is predicting the current arrangement will shift a second or third time, but anyone who assumes North Royal Street is a fixed address for the next 30 months is treating this differently than the market's own history suggests it should be treated.
The construction closing off the old market site is not cosmetic. Alexandria is rebuilding both the 153-year-old City Hall and the deteriorating two-level garage underneath Market Square, a project budgeted at $123.6 million under the city's 2025 to 2034 Capital Improvement Program. Construction mobilization began January 20, 2026, and the timeline calls for roughly two and a half years of work, with a target of restoring both the historic building and a rebuilt public square by fall 2028 if the schedule holds. Design work is being led by LEO A DALY on the building itself, with the Alexandria-based firms Rust Orling Architecture and LandDesign handling the plaza.
The scope explains why this is not a quick patch job. Crews are removing a 1960s-era interior addition to City Hall, replacing the aging garage entirely, and rebuilding the plaza above it, along with updating the pipes, wiring, drainage, and security systems that visitors never see but that had reached the point where another temporary fix no longer made sense to the city. For a block that has functioned as Alexandria's civic front porch, the site of council meetings, festivals, holiday trees, and Saturday mornings for generations, that is a long list of systems to touch at once.
The same fall calendar that includes a rebuilt Market Square also includes two of the neighborhood's longest-running traditions, both landing this weekend without any connection to the construction a few blocks away. The Twig's 84th Annual Historic Alexandria Homes Tour opens eight private residences in Old Town's southeast quadrant on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with tickets that were down to roughly 150 remaining as of early September. The tour is a fundraiser for Inova Alexandria Hospital, run entirely by volunteers through an organization founded in 1933, and this year's homes include one with a Picasso sketch, a Gilbert Stuart portrait, and at least one swimming pool tucked behind a facade that gives no hint of what is inside.
A few blocks over, John Carlyle Square Park hosts the 24th Annual Alexandria Art Festival on Saturday and Sunday, a free, juried show with roughly 190 exhibitors showing sculpture, painting, jewelry, pottery, and textiles. Neither event depends on Market Square being open, and neither one moved because of the construction. That is worth noticing on its own. Old Town's oldest institutions, a farmers market older than the country and a homes tour older than most of its residents, are both proving this fall that the neighborhood's rhythms keep running even when the ground underneath one of them is torn up.
For anyone whose Saturday routine runs through Market Square, the practical adjustments are small but real. The market itself is unchanged in hours, vendor count, and quality. The parking situation is different, and free garage parking during market hours is the workaround the city has built in. The bigger unknown is what happens if the 1960s pattern repeats itself even partially. A single relocation that holds steady for two and a half years is the plan. A relocation that shifts again before the plaza reopens would not be unprecedented on this exact block.
What is certain is that North Royal Street and the Tavern Square courtyard are where the vendors will be for now, and that the city has built more capacity into that temporary site than the market currently needs. Whether that capacity is used to grow the market during the disruption, or simply held in reserve until Market Square reopens, is one more detail this fall's construction fencing will eventually answer.
If you want the next update on what's shifting around Market Square, or you're curious how a project like this tends to ripple through a block you already know well, Stephanie Bredahl keeps close track of these changes in Old Town as they happen.