Drive down Powers Ferry Road past the golf course, or walk the PATH400 stretch near Wieuca, and there is a wooded slope running down to Nancy Creek that most people have looked at for years without ever setting foot on. It is not fenced. It is not marked. It just sits there, thick with kudzu and ivy, tucked between the 16th hole and the creek, doing nothing for anyone. If you have ever wondered why that particular pocket of a 268-acre park stayed wild while everything around it got trails, tennis courts, and a golf course, the answer traces back to the 1930s. When architect H. Chandler Egan laid out the original course design, he left that section out, likely because it was used to store fill dirt during construction. It has sat that way ever since.
That is about to change. The Chastain Park Conservancy is targeting a November 1 groundbreaking on a project called the Palisades, and the reason it matters goes beyond adding more park to a neighborhood that already has plenty. The Palisades has been positioned by the people planning it as the physical link between two trail systems Buckhead residents already use constantly: PATH400 to the north and the Atlanta Beltline to the south. The overgrown wedge behind the 16th hole, in other words, is not a minor addition. It is the missing piece.
What is actually being built
The Palisades will turn roughly 30 acres of that inaccessible land into a mile of soft nature trails, three public greens totaling about 3 acres, and a pedestrian bridge over Nancy Creek. The design, from landscape architecture firm Lord Aeck Sargent and builder SG Contracting, includes overlooks set roughly 40 feet above the golf course, an outdoor classroom, and a native plant garden and arboretum to replace the invasive growth that has taken over the site. A new entrance drive and parking area will also open up access to Farm Chastain, which currently sits somewhat cut off from the rest of the park.
As reported by Rough Draft Atlanta, Rosa McHugh, the Conservancy's president and CEO, has described the goal as building "a park within the park," a quiet counterpart to the golf course, tennis courts, and pool that already draw heavy daytime traffic. One overlook in particular seems to be a personal favorite of hers: a spot roughly 40 feet above the golf course that she has said will be a place to sit and watch the sunset.
That kind of space has been conspicuously missing from Chastain. The park is busy in the way active recreation makes a place busy, but it has not had much room for the opposite, somewhere to throw a blanket, read, or just sit without dodging a golf cart or a tennis match.
Why the timing lines up with what people asked for
The Palisades did not appear out of nowhere. During the pandemic, the Conservancy worked with the city to open part of the golf course informally for walking, yoga, and kids on bikes, and people used it heavily. That arrangement eventually fell apart because it conflicted with regular golf activity, but it left the Conservancy with clear evidence of demand for passive greenspace inside a park that had almost none. That feedback fed directly into the 2025 Chastain Park Comprehensive Plan Update, which the Atlanta City Council approved and which set the Palisades project in motion. The Conservancy has already started replacing invasive plants along the park's outskirts as a preview of the larger restoration to come.
Why this particular 30 acres matters more than it looks like it should
Buckhead has spent the last several years slowly closing a real gap in its trail network. PATH400 marked a milestone in September of 2025 when the Wieuca Road to Loridans Drive segment opened, a three-quarter-mile stretch built around an 80-foot bridge that created nearly three continuous miles of connected greenway through the neighborhood. Two more PATH400 projects are currently moving through the City of Atlanta's procurement process: a short connector near Peachtree Park, and a southern link where existing sidewalks will be widened into a full trail that meets the Beltline. Both are expected to break ground in early 2027.
What is easy to miss is that none of that paved trail work actually completes the connection on its own. According to the planning materials behind the project, the Palisades site has been specifically selected as the gateway linking PATH400 to the Atlanta Beltline. The kudzu-covered slope next to the 16th hole is not a side project running parallel to the trail network Buckhead has been building for years. It is the piece that makes the rest of it function as one continuous system rather than two separate trails that happen to run near each other.
If you have used PATH400 to bike toward the Beltline and hit a point where the route stops feeling continuous, that gap is what the Palisades is meant to close.
What this means for the next twelve months
As of early August, the most recent numbers the Conservancy had shared publicly, it had raised roughly $12 million of its $13 million goal. The last scheduled push toward that number was the Gilded Trail gala on August 8, a Western-themed fundraiser that combined dinner at The Chastain with a celebration at the St. Regis Atlanta. Whether that closed the remaining gap has not been reported since. If the goal has been met, construction starts November 1 and runs about a year, putting completion in late 2027.
That timeline gives residents a real window. The park you know now, the one where you can walk past the golf course without a construction fence in sight, has roughly two more months left in that state. Once ground breaks, expect a construction zone along the creek side of the course for a full year, along with some shift in how Farm Chastain is accessed while the new entrance drive goes in.
In the meantime, the amphitheater side of the park is still running its full fall calendar, and it is worth using before the rest of the property becomes a job site. James Taylor and His All-Star Band plays the Synovus Bank Amphitheater on September 17 and 18. TLC, Salt-N-Pepa, and En Vogue bring their "It's Iconic" tour through on October 2 as a table show, meaning coolers, food, and lawn chairs are allowed on the grass for that one. Both sit inside the same 268 acres where crews will soon be clearing kudzu and pouring trail base a few hundred yards away.
The read for anyone who already calls this home
None of this changes anything about your address. It changes what is within a five-minute walk of it. For a decade, the land between the golf course and Nancy Creek has been part of Chastain Park only in the sense that it falls inside the property line. Once the Palisades opens, it becomes the reason PATH400 and the Beltline function as one network instead of two, and it gives Buckhead something it has genuinely lacked: a quiet, passive corner of its biggest park that isn't organized around a tee time or a match.
If you already live here, that overlook forty feet above the course is going to be worth the walk once it opens. If you are the kind of person who tracks how a neighborhood actually changes, block by block and acre by acre, rather than relying on a listing description to tell you, this is the kind of shift that tends to matter more than it first appears.
Jared Sapp Real Estate Group works this part of Atlanta closely enough to notice when a forgotten 30 acres turns into the most useful trail connection in the neighborhood. If you want to talk about what else is changing on your block, Let's Connect.
