On May 22, 2025, a Franklin resident named Carl Roberts stood near the historic square and photographed a demolition excavator tearing into the building that had housed City Hall since 1981. He was taking pictures for a grandson in Fort Collins, Colorado, who loves construction equipment. Asked whether the noise bothered him, Roberts said he had hearing aids, so if it got to be too much he would just turn them down.
That was the visible part of the story, the part that made the local news. The quieter part, the one that actually affects anyone who needs a building permit, a business license, or a seat at a Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting, is that city government did not pause while its building came down. It split into five different addresses across Franklin, and most of that split is still the operating reality today.
A Site With More History Than the Mall Ever Had
Before there was a mall on that block, and long before the mall became a City Hall nobody quite intended it to be, the site held stables, buggy repair shops, an auction barn with livestock, a grocery store, and an automotive sales lot. A one-story mall replaced all of that in 1974. It lasted less than a decade as retail before it closed, and the city bought the building in the early 1980s because it needed office space and the price was right. What was supposed to be temporary held city government for 44 years.
Where the Building Actually Went
Staff held their final Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting inside the old building at 109 Third Avenue South on January 28, 2025, then spent the following months relocating before demolition began that May. By September 21, 2026, when members of the Board of Mayor and Aldermen, the Historic Zoning Commission, and the Planning Commission toured the site together, they were walking through a building with its structural steel already topped out rather than a hole in the ground.
City staff have an unofficial name for the whole effort: Completing the Square. Kelly Dannenfelser, the city's assistant director of planning and sustainability, has described the old building bluntly.
"The missing tooth on the corner of the square."
That was her line for a blank, windowless facade that never matched the storefronts around it.
The Split That's Still True Right Now
Here is where the practical part starts. Franklin's city administration didn't consolidate into one temporary office while it waited out construction. It spread out across town.
- Administrative offices moved into the FirstBank building at 740 Columbia Avenue, near the police station.
- Billing, licensing, IT, and communications production moved to 204 9th Avenue South.
- Fire administration and inspectors moved to 507 New Highway 96 West, the former Franklin Special District office.
Public meetings split even further. The Board of Mayor and Aldermen, the Planning Commission, the Beer Board, and the Capital Investment Committee now meet at the Williamson County Administrative Complex at 1320 West Main Street, the same building where the county commission holds its own sessions. The Historic Zoning Commission, the Board of Zoning Appeals, and the Transit Authority meet instead at the Eastern Flank Event Facility at 1368 Eastern Flank Circle.
If you've ever shown up at the wrong building for a zoning hearing since 2025, this is why it happened. Two boards that sound like they'd share a room are, in practice, meeting on opposite sides of the county. City staff addressed this directly at a FrankTalks session, pointing visitors to two-hour parking on Ninth Avenue and additional parallel spots on Acton Street and Plaza Street, specifically because so many people were arriving unsure where to leave a car.
What's Actually Moving Behind the Fence
The construction itself has been steady rather than dramatic. General contractor Skanska signed a contract for the building reported at roughly 53 million dollars and began site work in May 2025. Vertical construction followed, and the project reached its topping-out milestone in June 2026, the point where the final structural beam goes into place and a building stops being scaffolding and starts being a shape. The city's broader estimate for the entire block, not just the building itself, has run as high as 107 million dollars, a figure that folds in the park, the streetscape, and the parking structure alongside the office space.
Every source that has published a completion date in the past year lands on the same window: mid-2027. That includes the city's own project page, the Tennessee Municipal League's coverage from January 2026, and local television reporting from this September. Officials describe the project as being about a year from opening, language that tracks with a mid-2027 target rather than a specific month.
What Doesn't Move
Two fixtures on the block have stayed put through the entire process. The parking structure on Second Avenue remains in use, and so does the Pull-Tight Theatre, Franklin's community playhouse. Neither has closed or relocated since demolition began, which means the block has never been fully unusable, even while the City Hall building itself came down and went back up around them.
The Parking Number That Changed Along the Way
Early reporting on the project, back when demolition was just starting in 2025, described an underground garage for 300 cars. The city's more recent published breakdown, from April 2026, refines that figure to roughly 200 new subgrade spaces. Combined with the Second Avenue garage that never left, the city projects the finished block will offer more than 500 total parking spaces, a real increase over what the old mall-turned-office-building ever provided. Nobody got the earlier number wrong. A two-year project produces more than one planning estimate, and the most recent city documentation is the one worth trusting if you're picturing where you'll park downtown in 2027.
What Opens With the Building, Not Before It
The new complex includes a one-acre public park along Third Avenue South, with seating, a garden, shade trees, and a fountain, plus swinging benches Dannenfelser has specifically described in city briefings. Street-level shell space is budgeted to bring retail or restaurant tenants to Third Avenue South, activating a stretch of sidewalk the old building's blank wall never did. None of it opens ahead of schedule. The park, the streetscape, and the storefronts arrive with the rest of the building in that mid-2027 window, not before.
The Timeline Worth Holding Onto
For anyone who just needs a permit or wants to catch a Planning Commission vote, the useful fact isn't the 2027 opening date. It's that for roughly another year, the address you need depends entirely on which piece of city government you're trying to reach, and that split has already been true since the opening months of 2025. The steel rising behind the fence on the square is the visible half of this story. The quieter half, the one that actually determines whether you drive to Columbia Avenue or to Eastern Flank Circle, has been the day-to-day reality for a year and a half already and will stay that way until the doors on Third Avenue South open again.
Susan Salazar keeps an eye on projects like this one because they shape how downtown Franklin actually functions long before any of it shows up in a listing photo. If you're curious how a specific piece of the city's civic pipeline touches the block you live on, reach out to Susan Salazar.
