Walk the boardwalk over Orkin Lake on a September morning and you'll pass runners, a few dog walkers, maybe a stroller crew heading toward Roswell Road. It's been open since May 2025, long enough that most people who use it regularly have stopped thinking of it as new. But drive fifteen minutes west to Old Riverside Drive and you'll find something that still looks like a construction site: graders, silt fence, a chain-link perimeter around 23 acres of wooded riverbank that the city has owned since 2014 and talked about turning into a park since 2012.
That gap between finished and still-fenced-off is the story of Sandy Springs' relationship with its own river this year. The city sits on more than 20 miles of Chattahoochee shoreline, but for most of its history as a municipality, that shoreline has been something residents could see from a bridge, not something they could walk to on a Tuesday evening. This fall, two projects that have been grinding through design, funding and permitting for the better part of a decade are either finished or close enough to touch. A third decision, one that determines whether the next mile of trail gets built at all, lands this month.
What You Can Already Walk
The 1.88-mile stretch known as Segment 2A connects Morgan Falls Overlook Park to Roswell Road at Cimarron Parkway, and its centerpiece is a 2,933-foot boardwalk that carries the trail over Orkin Lake. It sounds like a straightforward build. It wasn't. Crews broke ground near the Morgan Falls dog park in December 2022 and almost immediately ran into solid rock beneath the lakebed, which pushed the schedule into 2023 and drove costs up before the concrete decking, railings, benches and lighting were finished in early 2025. The ribbon cutting didn't happen until that May, about 100 people showing up on a sunny Friday to walk a path that had been promised since the city adopted its Trail Master Plan back in 2019.
Total cost for that 1.88-mile segment came to $8.5 million, split between a $3 million state grant through the Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Program and city funds, with the Sandy Springs Conservancy chipping in the $30,000 in community support needed to help secure the state grant in the first place. Call it roughly $4.5 million per mile. Keep that number in mind, because the next segment is going to cost twice that.
Why the Next Mile Is So Much More Expensive
Segment 2C is the next piece of what the city calls the Morgan Falls Park Connector, a planned 1.6-mile extension that would run from the completed boardwalk area east along a Chattahoochee tributary, through wooded terrain with rock outcroppings and waterfalls, before reaching Grogans Ferry Road near Roswell Road. When finished, it would stretch the loop from 1.8 miles to roughly 3.4 miles, a meaningful step toward the 5.6-mile loop the Sandy Springs Conservancy has been mapping out since 2019.
The estimated price tag is $14.5 million, which works out to about $9 million per mile, nearly double what 2A cost. The terrain explains most of that gap. Where 2A ran along relatively open ground near the dog park, 2C has to cross a tributary, navigate rock formations and waterfalls, and thread past several apartment complexes and Grogan's Bluff, a protected 126-acre neighborhood whose residents have asked for a different kind of community engagement than the city used on the first segment.
The funding picture is still being assembled. The PATH Foundation has committed $1 million. The Conservancy has pledged another $30,000. The city has roughly $5 million already sitting in its trail fund. The rest depends on a $3 million grant application to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and that final application is due this month, September 2026, more than a year after the initial application went in back in early 2025. Sandy Springs City Council is expected to make a call on the remaining funding later this year, which means the decision that determines whether this segment gets built at all is happening essentially now, while residents are still getting used to the segment before it.
A Park Fourteen Years in the Making
If the trail's next mile is still a question mark, Old Riverside Park is close to an answer. The city first budgeted for a park on this 23-acre site in 2012, purchased the land from Fulton County in 2014, then let the project sit dormant for years before hiring Lose Design in 2022 to draft a master plan. Design work continued through 2024. In April 2026, the City Council finally awarded a construction contract, just under $4 million, to Eastern Builders, with officials saying they expect the work to wrap by the end of this year.
The finished park, located north of the Riverside Swim and Tennis Club near the intersection of Old Riverside and Riverside drives, will include public access to the Chattahoochee, a playground, green infrastructure, nature trails and a restroom facility, while leaving most of the site's forest untouched. For residents in west-central Sandy Springs, it closes a real gap. This part of the city has been notably underserved by parkland relative to areas near Morgan Falls or Abernathy Greenway, something council members have acknowledged directly.
"It is very rare that we get to construct a full-fledged park like this, given how built out Sandy Springs is," Councilmember Andrew Chinsky said when the contract was approved.
That scarcity is the point. A city this developed doesn't get many chances to add 23 new acres of public riverfront, and the fact that this one took fourteen years from first budget line to groundbreaking says something about how hard that kind of land assembly actually is here.
What Fills the Weekends Between Now and Then
None of this happens in isolation from the rest of the fall calendar, which is its own kind of dense this year. If you're deciding how to spend the next several Saturdays:
- Sandy Springs Artsapalooza (Fall Arts & Craft Festival), September 12 to 13 — roughly 125 artists, a children's play area and live music near the Century Springs Office Complex on Lake Forrest Drive
- Blue Stone Arts & Music Festival, September 25 to 26 — the sixth annual run, held on City Green at City Springs, with an Artist Market and an Emerging Artist Exhibit
- Food That Rocks — the city's tasting fundraiser featuring dozens of local restaurants, typically landing in this same late-September stretch at City Green
- Spooky Springs — the family-friendly Halloween event at Abernathy Greenway, held each October
- A new modular ceramics studio next to the Abernathy Arts Center, built under a $600,000 contract, is expected to open Art Sandy Springs' public ceramics classes this fall, though the city has noted some final permitting is still pending
Taken together, the calendar and the concrete are telling the same story from different angles. A city that spent years talking about closing gaps, between neighborhoods and green space, between festival season and everyday recreation, is closing several of them in the same few months. The boardwalk you can already walk, the park that's finally under construction, and the trail segment whose funding gets decided this month are three stages of the same decade-long project. If you've lived here through the years when Old Riverside Park was just a line item and the Morgan Falls Loop was just a map on a Conservancy newsletter, this is the fall where a fair amount of that becomes something you can actually stand on.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near the river corridor, or simply curious how these projects tend to shape demand in the neighborhoods around them, the team at Tina Sui tracks these shifts closely. Request a personalized market & investment consult whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
