Chastain Park Palisades Project: Trails, Plans and Timeline

Walk the cart path along the back nine at Chastain Park Golf Course and you'll pass a stretch of woods most golfers never think twice about. It rises about 40 feet above the fairway, drops down to the winding banks of Nancy Creek, and for as long as anyone can remember it's been off limits, choked with kudzu and ivy, occasionally used as an informal dumping ground because nobody had a reason to go in and clean it up. It has sat that way since the park opened in the 1940s.

That's about to change. The Chastain Park Conservancy is targeting a November 1 groundbreaking on a project called the Palisades, roughly 30 acres tucked between the golf course's 16th hole and the creek, and if the timeline holds, this is the last fall Chastain Park residents will look at that hillside and see nothing but overgrowth.

Why this specific 30 acres sat empty for almost twenty years

The Palisades isn't a new idea. It first showed up on the Conservancy's radar in a 2008 master plan, then sat there while the park worked through other priorities, including a 2014 to 2016 capital campaign that raised $5.2 million for a new playground and pedestrian trails elsewhere in the park. The land itself was part of the problem. It's cut off from the rest of Chastain by Nancy Creek and a steep rise in elevation, so it was never built into the golf course's original design and never got wired into the park's day to day use. When the private operator running the golf course let its lease lapse in 2016, the city and the Conservancy finally had an opening to look at the parcel differently.

What actually moved the project forward, though, was the 2025 Chastain Park Comprehensive Plan Update, approved by the Atlanta City Council after a public engagement process. That update formalized something the Conservancy had noticed anecdotally for years, and confirmed loudly during the pandemic. When the golf course opened part of its grounds to the public as informal open space, people used it to walk, do yoga, and let kids ride bikes, activities that don't fit anywhere else in a park whose acreage is almost entirely spoken for by golf, tennis, swimming, baseball, softball, and basketball. As Rough Draft Atlanta reported, Rosa McHugh, the Conservancy's president and CEO, described the goal as building "a park within the park," which is a fairly direct way of saying Chastain has plenty of places to play a sport and almost nowhere to just sit down. J.P. Matzigkeit, a Conservancy co-founder, has pointed out that once finished, the Palisades will be close in size to Blue Heron Nature Preserve or the Atlanta Botanical Garden, each around 30 acres. That's a useful way to picture the scale of it. It's not a pocket park addition. It's a second green space roughly the size of a garden most Atlantans already know well, opening inside a park they thought they already knew completely.

What's actually going in

The design comes from Lord Aeck Sargent, with SG Contracting handling construction. Based on the plans the Conservancy has released, here's what residents can expect to find once it's finished:

• A one-mile trail system winding through the wooded section down to the creek
• A 153-foot pedestrian bridge spanning Nancy Creek, connecting the Palisades to a new entrance drive
• An oval lawn at the highest point of the site, roughly 40 feet above the fairways, oriented to face west for watching the sunset
• A native tree arboretum and pollinator meadow, replacing the kudzu and invasive growth currently covering the site
• A natural play area and an outdoor classroom for environmental programming
• A new entrance drive and parking area that will also serve Farm Chastain and the Conservancy's offices

That last item solves a problem longtime users of the lower part of the park will recognize immediately. Right now, the only vehicle access to that section cuts straight through the golf course, which is one of the busiest public courses in the city. Part of the Palisades project moves that road, and the current asphalt gets returned to fairway.

The money, and the date that depends on it

The Palisades carries a $13 million price tag, and almost none of it is coming from city tax dollars. The Conservancy has funded the project through family foundations, private foundations, individual donors, corporate partners, and civic organizations. The city of Atlanta owns the land and has supported the effort through coordination and partnership, but the capital itself is philanthropic.

As of the Conservancy's own update in mid-July, more than $12 million had been raised, leaving about $1 million to close. The push to finish that gap came on August 8, when the Conservancy hosted The Gilded Trail, a Western Glam gala split across two venues: a Trailblazer Dinner at The Chastain restaurant, with sponsor tables starting at $20,000, followed by a Boots and Bubbles party at the St. Regis Atlanta, with tickets at $750 apiece. Events like this are how a privately funded public amenity gets built when the money isn't running through a city bond.

The Conservancy's own construction timeline runs 12 to 16 months from groundbreaking, which puts a realistic opening somewhere between late 2027 and early 2028 if the November 1 start date holds. That date itself is conditional on the fundraising goal being met, so residents watching for progress this fall have two things worth tracking: whether the last of that $1 million closed, and whether crews show up at the site once the calendar turns to November.

Chastain Park has gone through this pattern before. The 2014 to 2016 campaign that funded Play Chastain and Walk Chastain followed the same shape, a defined dollar goal, a philanthropic push to close it, then a construction window with a public payoff at the end. The Palisades is a larger version of the same idea, and if it opens on the schedule the Conservancy has laid out, it will be the first time in the park's history that the land between the 16th hole and Nancy Creek has had a name most people in the neighborhood actually know.

If you're weighing what a home near Chastain Park is worth once a project like this is finished, or you're already living nearby and thinking about your next move in this part of Buckhead, Michael Kriethe has spent years working this pocket of Atlanta and is glad to talk through it.