After more than a decade of planning, the developers of the Church & Market development in downtown Leesburg celebrated the groundbreaking for the project Wednesday afternoon.

The project includes 116 rental apartments and more than 33,000 square feet combined of retail, restaurant and office space on the former Loudoun Times-Mirror property off Market Street, stretching back to the parking lot and alley that borders Church and Loudoun streets. It was approved by the Town Council in 2019.

“When I started on the project many years back, I try not to do the math because I always have to add a year,” said Blair White, vice president of Landmark Commercial Real Estate. “My benchmark is when we first started this I had no house, no wife, no fiancée, no kids, and maybe no grey hair. That has all changed while I’ve been working on this.”

“This was a unique project. It’s hard to fit something brand new like this into the kind of historic fabric we have here in Leesburg and that has been here for as long as it has,” he said.

Construction will begin with the demolition of the former Times-Mirror printing and warehouse building in the next few weeks.

Leesburg Director of Economic Development Russell Seymour said the downtown redevelopment project will be a boon to the town. “It really speaks volumes about Leesburg and the community talking about reinvesting in the town,” he said.

“When you look at downtown areas, one of the things everyone is concerned about is you see the areas where downtown sort of ebbs and flows, and development in different areas tends to pull people out of the downtown,” he said. “Leesburg has done a good job at keeping people and balancing that out between downtown and the surrounding lands.”

“This project is a really great redevelopment story. We are talking about buildings; you’ve got a development company now that is very anxious to come in to work with the town and is looking at redeveloping an entire block. You need that. That is part of the growth,” he added.

John Torti, principal and chairman of Torti Gallas, led the team of planners and architect that converted the originally approved, chiefly commercial development into a more residentially focused one and that won approval of the Town Council.

“It was a privilege to work on this project. The way we see it in our firm is we love traditional urbanism and traditional architecture, and when we can combine them both in such a precious place it doesn’t go unnoticed,” he said.