We proudly announce our new digs. The Falls Church News-Press has moved its operations into offices on the fifth floor, the top floor, of the 200 Little Falls St. building. The move was made efficiently with the help of some good preparation and a small moving company’s efforts the day after last week’s paper went to the printer. By Friday we were up and running, and although there are still a lot of unemptied cardboard boxes piled up, the seamless transition to this week’s and future papers has occurred.

Now we sit perched in an enviable position, five floors up with big windows facing right down on the central intersection, of Route 7 and 29, of the Little City, with a panorama that works from the State Theater on one end to Anthony’s Restaurant on the other. Beyond stretches a seemingly endless tree-covered Northern Virginia suburbia, and above a magnificent canopy of sky.

Last Friday, our first full day in our new office, our editor visited the monthly festivities of First Friday at the Art and Frame, and enticed both the mayor and the city manager attending there to step outside and take a look up. There, it was pointed out, the mighty News-Press now nests, high up and behind the windows, very likely with some residues of our staff still moving about, cleaning out moving boxes.

Of course, of interest to Mayor Baroukh and City Manager Shields was the fact that the famous building now housing us also looms, on its other side, directly over City Hall, being right across the street, in fact. Jokes were made about listening devises, etc.

Actually, this marks the fifth location for the News-Press since it was founded and launched its first edition 20 years ago this spring. The first two were a tiny, then a larger, office at 205 N. Virginia Avenue, overlooking the Exxon at N. Virginia and W. Broad. It was at that location where birth was first to the News-Press, the memorable travails and delights going into the maiden edition that hit the streets March 28, 1991, and into holding on tenaciously amid horrid economic headwinds through the end of that year.

A beneficiary of the kindness of strangers in those days, actually more like new friends from our first year, the paper moved with some months of free rent thrown in to the location where it remained from 1992 through 2006, its most famous location on the second floor facing the street at 929 W. Broad.

But there were horrid problems with the central heat and air in that old building, and we finally had enough with freezing in the winters and roasting in the summers. With the completion of a new office space in the Panera Bread building, we moved there in April 2006 in very amiable arrangement. And now, we’ve been afforded yet still another magnificent opportunity that was simply too good to pass on.