Community building, pool to close Sunday

LEESBURG — Sunday marks the end of an era and the beginning of another in Leesburg.

The Leesburg City Pool and the Leesburg Community Building on Dixie Avenue — the site of countless weddings, political functions, community meetings and other events — close as the city prepares to erect a new, modern building on the site, at the entrance to Venetian Gardens.

The Community Building will be fenced off Monday in preparation for demolition, but city officials hope to save two placards from the current structure. One indicates that the building was built in 1953-54 and the other that it was remodeled in 1983-84.

Plans also call for a monument to firefighters to be saved, and workers will remove a heat pump from the Venetian Gardens pool so that it can be used at the nearby Dabney pool.

In May, the City Commission approved spending $3.5 million on the new building, parking lots and landscaping, with a completion date of July 4, 2019. The commission will use money from last year’s sale of the city’s fiber optics company.

The building will feature a 7,200-square-foot ballroom with a wall of glass overlooking MLK Island.

The old pool, meanwhile, will not be rebuilt at Venetian Gardens. Instead, the City Commission agreed to spend $2.7 million to build a pool in the Susan Street Recreation Complex area.