Brookhaven Park Was the Dog Park. This Fall, It's the Whole Show.
From 2022 into late 2024, if you drove past the corner of Peachtree and Osborne, what you saw was construction fencing. Brookhaven Park, the 21-acre greenspace the city calls one of Atlanta's best dog parks, spent those two-plus years as a work site: new restrooms, a rebuilt pavilion, a larger playground, a redone dog park parking lot. The front half of the park only became city property on April 26, 2022, when Brookhaven completed its acquisition from DeKalb County. The ribbon cutting didn't happen until November 2024, not quite two years ago.
This October, that same address becomes the site of the biggest weekend on the city's calendar. The Brookhaven International Festival, now in its fourth year, is leaving the Peachtree Creek Greenway, its home for the past two years, and moving to Brookhaven Park for the first time. That's not a scheduling accident. It's a city showing off what it just finished building.
The 2026 festival runs Saturday, October 17 and Sunday, October 18, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days at 4158 Peachtree Road NE. Admission is free.
A few practicals worth keeping straight if you're planning your weekend around it:
Brookhaven's District 3 Councilmember, Madeleine Simmons, whose district includes the park, put the move in plain terms when the city announced the lineup in August 2026:
"Brookhaven Park is ready to show off some of its amazing improvements to a wider audience since the City became its official owner."
That's the through line. This isn't a new festival looking for a home. It's an established one, now in its fourth year, being pointed at a park the city spent two construction seasons rebuilding.
Before 2022, Brookhaven Park was mostly known for one thing: the dog park. Locals who wanted a big open lawn, a mini perimeter trail, and a pavilion with a grill area already knew where to go. What most people didn't see, because it was behind temporary fencing, was the multi-year rebuild happening around it.
The playground installation alone took most of a season, starting in mid-August 2024 with new shade structures, a synthetic turf field, and a small pavilion, and wrapping in late September of that year. The dog park itself was closed for stretches during construction while the front lawn stayed open with parking available from Peachtree Road. By the time the city held its ribbon cutting that November, the park had a rebuilt playground, new restrooms, and a reconfigured dog park lot, on top of the pavilion, grill area, and mini-trail that were already part of the park.
Two years is a short runway between "finished renovating" and "hosting the city's flagship cultural event." That gap tells you the city wasn't just done with construction. It was waiting for a reason to bring people back in numbers.
Here's a detail that trips people up if they only skim the festival announcement: the Sunday 5K doesn't start at Brookhaven Park. It starts at the Peachtree Creek Greenway's Briarwood Road trailhead, the festival's old home turf, at 1793 Briarwood Road.
The course is USATF-certified and serves as a qualifier for the Northside Hospital Peachtree Road Race. It benefits We Love Buford Highway, the nonprofit whose mission is preserving the multicultural identity of the Buford Highway corridor. Proceeds fund the Buford Highway Orchestra Program, the group's free afterschool music program. According to the organization's executive director, Lily Pabian, 96 young musicians have gone through the program to date.
So this year's festival is really running on two sites, tied together by a shuttle route and a shared weekend. If you're used to parking near the Greenway for past festivals, that habit still works for Sunday morning. If you're headed to the main event, you're now driving, walking, or MARTA-ing to a different part of the city entirely.
If your regular walking loop runs through Blackburn Park or Skyland Park, you may have already noticed something new this year: patches of unmowed grass and wildflowers where there used to be turf.
That's intentional. In August 2026, the city's Arborist Division introduced Piedmont Prairies, native tall-grass plantings designed to address erosion and topography problems in specific spots at both parks. These aren't decorative. The Piedmont Prairie is a native Southeastern ecosystem that supports pollinators, and the city's arborists are maintaining the new plantings on a weekly to biweekly schedule through spring, summer, and fall rather than mowing them flat.
The city has said it plans to add more of these plantings across its parks over the next couple of years, and residents curious about starting one on their own property can reach the Tree Canopy Preservation Division directly at [email protected]. It's a small change, but it's the kind of thing that explains an oddly unkempt-looking corner of a park you've walked past for years without anyone posting a sign about it.
The other piece of this fall's park story isn't an event. It's construction equipment.
In May 2026, the Atlanta Regional Commission voted to award Brookhaven $13,593,489 in federal funding to complete Phase II of the Peachtree Creek Greenway, the trail extension running from the existing North Druid Hills Road trailhead southwest to the Atlanta city line. That connection matters more than its length suggests: it's the link that ties the Greenway's "Model Mile," which opened in December 2019, into the Atlanta Beltline's Northeast Trail, PATH400, and the South Fork Conservancy trail system, along with last-mile access to MARTA's Buford Highway bus line and Lindbergh Station.
The engineering choice for this stretch is notable on its own. Rather than clearing a wide corridor along the creek bank, the city's final design calls for seven pedestrian bridges and long sections of elevated boardwalk built adjacent to or over the water, a deliberate move to avoid raising the creek's flood elevation. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2026 and is expected to take about 24 months, according to the city's own project page.
There's a private-money angle here too. The city's own funding announcement noted that Phase II's advancement lines up with a newly approved $150 million private redevelopment along North Druid Hills Road, tied to the broader Northbend project replacing the old Corporate Square office park, which includes an $8 million private investment in Greenway infrastructure. Public trail money and private redevelopment capital are now moving on the same timeline along the same corridor.
Not every trail plan in Brookhaven is moving forward this year, though. In late August 2026, the city council pulled a previously planned multi-use path from the Ashford Dunwoody Road and Windsor Parkway intersection project after resident feedback, keeping a standard sidewalk improvement but dropping the bike path entirely between Lanier Drive and Mabry Road. And Phase III of the Greenway, the stretch that would eventually connect further south, is still just a $50,000 alignment study the council approved in January 2026, with a third route option now being evaluated near Barone Avenue. That one is years from breaking ground.
None of these three threads, the festival's new address, the prairie plantings at Blackburn and Skyland, the Greenway's construction start, happened because of the others. But they're landing in the same season, and together they say something specific about how Brookhaven is using its park investment right now: less spread evenly across all eleven city parks, more concentrated into a handful of flagship spaces that the city is actively building out and then putting to public use.
If you live here, that means your regular routine, the dog park run, the walk around Blackburn's boardwalk, the evening loop on the Greenway, is about to look different for reasons that have nothing to do with the weather. Notice the new grass. Plan around the festival's new location. Expect equipment along the creek corridor for a while.
Darron O'Bonnon has spent years watching how Brookhaven's public investment shows up in the neighborhoods he works in, from Dresden Drive's tenant mix to the parks that back up to some of the city's most design-conscious homes. If you're curious how any of this connects to what a specific property is worth right now, or just want a second opinion on a home you're already watching in Brookhaven, reach out to Darron O'Bonnon directly.
Whether you're in the research phase at the beginning of your real estate search or know exactly what you're looking for, you'll benefit from having a real estate professional.