September 10, 2026
Ask a longtime College Park resident about Six West or the botanical garden and you'll probably get a shrug. These projects have existed as renderings, groundbreaking photos, and city council press releases for years, the kind of civic promises that show up in local news and then fade into the background while you keep driving the same streets you always have. That pattern just changed. Between May and November of this year, four separate threads that spent most of their existence as plans and press releases have started handing residents something they can actually walk into, throw a leash on, or buy a ticket for. That's the story here, not four disconnected updates but one shift: College Park's civic calendar is finally producing outcomes instead of announcements.
Start with the one that's done. On May 13, 2026, the city held a ribbon-cutting for Paws on Main, a fenced dog park at 2541 Main Street. It sounds small until you realize this is College Park's first public dog park, period. Not the newest one, the first one. For as long as the city has existed, there was nowhere designated for an off-leash dog to run that belonged to the public rather than a private yard or a drive to another municipality.
The park itself is built with actual dog-park logic, not just a fenced lawn: agility structures for training, separate enclosed sections for large and small dogs, and water stations so summer visits don't require hauling your own bowl. Councilman Roderick Gay led the project through what the city described as interdepartmental collaboration, which is bureaucratic language for "multiple departments actually finished something together." If you live within walking distance of Main Street and have been driving to Hapeville or East Point to let your dog off leash, that trip is over.
The bigger story is happening a few minutes away on Herschel Road, where the Roderick Gay Botanical Garden broke ground on October 30, 2025. That's not a typo. Less than twelve months ago, this was a dedication marker and a shovel photo op on the former Camp Truitt 4-H property. The garden's own site now says a new section opens this fall, which means somewhere in the next several weeks, a project that was dirt and blueprints last October becomes a place you can actually walk through.
Phase one, per city and county officials, includes roadways, walking trails, a promenade, a roundabout with a fountain, and two historic cabins being remodeled into a welcome center and a library and bookstore focused on local ecology and history. What's notable is what isn't changing: the existing 4-H camp, senior center, and GROWL community garden all continue operating on the site during construction, so this isn't a case of a new amenity displacing an old one.
The garden carries Councilman Gay's name for a reason beyond politics. He's a trained horticulturist with a background in Plant and Soil Science from Tuskegee University, and by his own account he's been pushing for this space for roughly two decades, close enough to the site that he's said he can see it from his own front door. The land itself is secured through a 50-year lease with Fulton County, which is the kind of detail that tells you this isn't a five-year experiment. It's meant to outlast the current council.
Then there's the event that doesn't require a groundbreaking at all, just a date on the calendar. College Park Day returns Saturday, October 3, 2026, from noon to 6 p.m. at the College Park Aviation Museum and Airport. Last year's version ran October 18, so this year's date lands about two weeks earlier, which matters if you've mentally filed the festival under "mid-October" and might otherwise miss it.
The format itself hasn't gotten smaller. This year's lineup includes:
It's free, open to the public, and the city is providing free parking and shuttle service on top of bike racks at the site, which is worth knowing if you'd rather not fight for street parking near the museum.
The last piece lands a month later, and it's the one that shows how quickly things can change year to year even without a groundbreaking ceremony. The College Park Skyhawks, the Atlanta Hawks' NBA G League affiliate, open their 2026-27 season on Friday, November 6, at 7 p.m. against Raptors 905 at Gateway Center Arena. That opener kicks off a three-game homestand to start the year.
Here's the part worth noticing if you followed last season: in 2025-26, the Skyhawks opened on the road with a back-to-back against Raptors 905 on November 7 and 9, then came home for their first game a week later, on November 14. This year, the exact same opponent shows up first, but the location flips. You get opening night at home instead of watching it happen somewhere else. The season's other marked dates include an "Education Day" matinee against the Maine Celtics on December 2 and, after a road trip and the league's Winter Showcase in Orlando, the team's longest home stretch of the year in January, four straight games against the Westchester Knicks and Grand Rapids Gold. All 24 Skyhawks home games broadcast locally on Peachtree Sports Network.
Gateway Center Arena itself is worth a second look if you haven't been. It's a 3,500-seat venue owned and operated by the Atlanta Hawks, and its ownership group includes Naismith Hall of Famer Grant Hill and College Park native Tauheed "2 Chainz" Epps, a detail the team has made a point of publicizing since the venue's 2020 opening. That arena was actually the first proof that College Park's big promises could land somewhere real. Everything since has followed the same pattern.
None of this erases the fact that College Park still has projects sitting in the "someday" column. Six West, the 311-acre mixed-use development west of downtown, has been described in terms of thousands of jobs and a food hall since 2020, and its full build-out timeline still stretches toward 2035 or later. That's the old version of College Park news: big number, distant date, wait and see.
What's different about this particular stretch of 2026 is that four separate initiatives, a dog park, a botanical garden, an annual festival, and a G League franchise, all moved from planning language into something residents can use within roughly six months of each other. Layer that on top of what was already here, the shaded Phoenix Trail and the Historic College Park Golf Course, which has been open since 1929, and you get a stretch of Main Street and the surrounding streets that's noticeably more usable than it was a year ago. Not because of one big reveal, but because several smaller promises all came due around the same time.
If you've lived in College Park through a few of these announcement cycles, that's the thing to actually notice this fall. The gap between "the city said this was coming" and "this is here" just got a lot shorter.
Have questions about what's happening in your part of College Park, whether it's the new green space near Main Street or how these projects might shape values in the years ahead? Empower Realty Team knows this neighborhood block by block. Get in touch anytime.
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