The Falls Church office building that until late December of 2021 served as the five-year home of the Sun Gazette is pretty much now a pile of rubble.
That building and two others, including Applebee’s Restaurant, over a two-block area are being knocked down as part of a big construction project. Word is a big food store will be included at the new site.
Other than a creepy basement, an unreliable elevator and too many power outages, the old Broad Street building, where the Sun Gazette had a narrow and small second-floor office, served the paper well. It will be missed.
As tenants came and went, the Sun Gazette remained, producing weekly paper after paper, while avoiding the elevator and advising others to do the same.
The stay was originally supposed to last only from just nine months to a year. But as plans for the new project kept getting delayed, the Sun Gazette continued to re-up its monthly lease until it was time to leave for good in December.
The paper was the second-to-last tenant to vacate the building, moving across the street about a block or so away to its current location on the same Broad Street. The new locale is so close, the noise of the crumbling construction work of the old site can be heard.
So long 131 East Broad Street.
– Dave Facinoli
dfacinoli@sungazette.net