Tonight, a few hundred people will sit down for dinner at The Chastain, the farm-to-table restaurant tucked against the park's edge on Powers Ferry Road. It is the Trailblazer Dinner, the first half of a gala called The Gilded Trail, and by the time the evening moves to a Boots and Bubbles reception at the St. Regis Atlanta, the Chastain Park Conservancy will be within striking distance of the last dollar it needs to unlock land most people in Paces have never actually stood on.
That is not an exaggeration. The 30 acres in question, a wooded stretch along Nancy Creek near the golf course's 16th hole, has been functionally sealed off since before your grandparents were buying houses in this neighborhood. Design plans from the late 1930s show that golf course architect H. Chandler Egan simply left this section out, most likely because it served as a dumping ground for excess fill dirt during construction of the original course. Planners describing the site today have called it an 80-year-old dumping ground inside an ecologically challenged upland forest, with mounds of imported fill, construction debris, and kudzu that never got cleared because nobody built a reason to go back there.
That is the part of the story that gets lost in the concert listings and the golf tee times. The land isn't new. It is land Chastain has technically owned the entire time you have lived near it, and it has simply been invisible.
What the money is actually for
The project has a name, the Palisades, and a target that has moved very little over the past year: roughly $13 million to remediate and open those 30 acres, with the Conservancy reporting it had raised more than $12 million as of early July. Coverage this week put the remaining gap closer to $2 million, so the number is somewhere in that range depending on which week's fundraising totals you catch, but either way tonight's gala is designed to close most of what is left.
Rosa McHugh, the Conservancy's longtime president and CEO, has described the goal in terms that have nothing to do with programmed sports fields or amenity checklists. She told WABE she is especially looking forward to one overlook that will sit roughly 40 feet above the golf course, a spot to watch the sunset.
"What this place will be, will be is an opportunity to sit, really enjoy yourself, you know, throw a blanket, read a book, do tai chi, do yoga."
That is a different register than the amphitheater marquee across the park, and it is worth sitting with for a second. Chastain Park has spent decades known almost entirely as a place you go to do something scheduled: golf, tennis, a concert, a swim meet. The Palisades is the first major addition in years that is not built around a sport or a stage.
How big 30 acres actually is
Numbers like this are easy to skim past, so here is a comparison a Paces resident can actually picture. J.P. Matzigkeit, a Conservancy co-founder involved in the comprehensive plan, has pointed out that the Palisades will end up close in size to both the Blue Heron Nature Preserve down the road and the Atlanta Botanical Garden in Midtown, which are each roughly 30 acres themselves. You are not getting a trail extension. You are getting a second nature preserve's worth of land folded into a park you already thought you knew the edges of.
The concrete pieces, as currently planned:
- A new pedestrian bridge, 153 feet long, spanning Nancy Creek
- Just over a mile of new accessible walking trail
- A scenic overlook roughly 40 feet above the golf course grade
- A rerouted entrance drive and parking area serving the Conservancy offices, Farm Chastain, and the new trail system
- The relocation of the only vehicle road that currently cuts through the golf course to reach the park's lower half, with that asphalt reverting to fairway
That last item is the one longtime residents will actually feel. Anyone who has driven to the ball fields, the tennis center, or the pool has been cutting through one of the busiest public golf courses in Atlanta to get there. Moving that road is a quieter fix than a new trail, but it is the one that changes an actual weekly errand.
The design work is credited to Lord Aeck Sargent, with construction handled by SG Contracting. If the Conservancy hits its funding number this month, groundbreaking is targeted for November 1, with construction expected to run somewhere between 12 and 16 months by the Conservancy's own estimate, putting a realistic finish line in late 2027 or into early 2028.
Two weeks that do not usually overlap like this
Most years, Chastain's calendar runs on one track: the amphitheater's spring-through-fall concert season, largely disconnected from anything happening in the park's quieter corners. This August, three separate things are stacking on top of each other in a way that will not repeat for a while.
Tonight is the gala. On August 16, the Conservancy runs its fifth annual Chastain Park Auto Show, a free family event in the Red Parking Lot expecting more than 175 vehicles across various categories, with coffee from Ira Lane Coffee and other vendors on site. Then the amphitheater closes out its month with a run that has genuinely little in common night to night:
- Saturday, August 22: The Isley Brothers and The O'Jays, 7:30 p.m.
- Sunday, August 23: Jon Batiste with the Atlanta Pops Orchestra, 8:00 p.m.
- Saturday, August 29: Yacht Rock Revue's Primetime show, 8:00 p.m.
If you live close enough to walk to any of these, you are looking at a two-and-a-half week stretch where the park is simultaneously raising money for land you cannot see yet, showing off classic cars in a parking lot you drive past every day, and running three sold-out-adjacent nights of music that draw traffic well past Wieuca and Powers Ferry. None of that is coincidence exactly, but it is not how the calendar usually lines up either.
The food desert nobody planned around
One detail from the Conservancy's own 20-year master planning process is worth knowing if you spend any time in the park on foot. The planning document behind all of this explicitly names integrating food and beverage as a goal, because Chastain has functioned for years as what the plan itself calls a food desert. Right now, that means one real option: The Chastain restaurant, the MICHELIN Green Star bistro run by chef Christopher Grossman that took over the old Horseradish Grill space, with a garden on site and a partnership with Brash Coffee Roasters for its coffee program. It is the only place inside the park where you can sit down for a proper meal or grab something before a walk.
That is expected to change. A coffee-and-ice-cream concept called Chastain Creamery has been floated for a spot inside the park itself, which would be the first genuinely casual, grab-and-go option most residents have had here. Nothing about timing is firm, but it is a sign the Conservancy is treating the park's daily use, not just its concert nights, as something worth building around.
What this actually means if you live here
The version of this story most people get is "concert lineup" and "gala tonight," and both of those are true but incomplete. The fuller version is that Chastain Park is quietly closing out a near-century-long gap in its own footprint, funded in real time by neighbors who show up to a gala, and the land involved has been sitting untouched since before the amphitheater itself opened in 1944.
If the fundraising closes out this month the way the Conservancy is hoping, November 1 becomes the date construction starts on a piece of your own neighborhood you have driven past for years without ever having a reason to walk into. That is a strange thing to realize about a park you already thought you had fully explored.
If you have questions about what any of this means for a specific street, a specific listing, or how a project like this tends to move a market over a multi-year build, Stephen Beckwith has spent 24 years watching Buckhead and Paces change one project at a time. Let's Connect.