The nearly five-acre park in the heart of Peoplestown is moving into a three-year revitalization built from a plan residents helped create.
On Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, a community celebration with food, choir music and a marching band marked the project’s launch at Four Corners Park. Mayor Andre Dickens, Parks and Recreation Commissioner Doug Voss, District 4 Councilmember Jason Dozier, Park Pride CEO Michael Halicki and neighborhood leaders were among those there.
The project is supported by a $9.4 million Bezos Earth Fund grant to Park Pride, announced July 7. Atlanta was one of eight cities selected through the Earth Fund’s $100 million Greening America’s Cities initiative.
City and park leaders said improvements once expected to unfold over as much as 20 years can now advance within a three-year project window. That is not the same as a published construction schedule. No construction start date, phase-by-phase timeline or completion date has been announced.
What is there now, and what the plan proposes
Four Corners Park remains an active neighborhood space. It holds the Rick McDevitt Youth Center, a playground, pavilion, two basketball courts, grassy fields and a community garden. Community Care, Inc. runs programming from the youth center.
A 2025 Park Pride request for proposals for an earlier, separately funded phase said construction staging was expected to preserve access to the youth center, existing courts and other park facilities. Park Pride has not published a closure or access plan for the full $9.4 million project, so residents should not assume every part of the park will remain available throughout all three years.
The official 2026 announcement commits to accessible recreation, flexible gathering spaces, improved circulation and safety, environmental infrastructure, community gardening and composting.
The Peoplestown Revitalization Corporation identifies more specific work, including covered basketball courts, a toddler playground, a pavilion and stormwater improvements.
The community’s 2023 Four Corners Park vision plan goes further. It shows two playgrounds connected by a hillside slide, a skate area, walking circuit, classrooms, wetlands, expanded gardens, improved lighting, an electric-vehicle charging station and a proposed expansion of the youth center.
Those are elements of the conceptual plan, not a final construction list. The plan still has to be translated into construction documents, permits, budgets and phased work.
The first activity may be less visible than a new playground. George Epps, a Peoplestown native and Program and Facility Manager for Community Care, Inc., said after the kickoff that the early process includes “establishing and checking” foundations, flood safety and ground conditions. He said the first stage is intended to add hill slides, grills, a pavilion, an expanded playground and community garden.
That is the project’s stated direction, not a dated construction schedule.
The plan came before the money
Community engagement for Four Corners Park ran from May through November 2023. The vision plan carries a 2023 date, while the Peoplestown Revitalization Corporation says the comprehensive plan was completed in March 2024 with the Park Pride Visioning team, Friends of Peoplestown Parks and neighborhood residents.
In February 2025, Park Pride awarded funding for an initial portion of the plan, including a new playground, pavilion, walking path and garden improvements. An April 2025 request for proposals then sought a design team to translate that portion into construction documents.
That sequence matters. When the $9.4 million arrived, nobody had to begin by asking residents what they wanted from the park. The community-backed document already existed.
The money does not eliminate the design, permitting and construction work still ahead. It gives Park Pride and the city a funded plan to advance instead of an unfunded list of ideas.
Worth keeping straight: this is a philanthropic grant to Park Pride, not a city bond. Park Pride is leading the redesign and construction in partnership with residents, while the Atlanta Department of Parks and Recreation provides city oversight.
The green infrastructure planned inside Four Corners Park is also separate from the city’s Custer Avenue stormwater project. That project is controlled by the Department of Watershed Management and involves a large underground storage vault beneath a different proposed park. Capital B has reported on the neighborhood dispute surrounding that project.
Halicki said Four Corners will include its own green infrastructure intended to help address flooding.
In announcing the grant, Dickens described the project as an investment in “a Peoplestown community shaped by a history of redlining, displacement and infrastructure decisions that cut neighborhoods off from opportunity.”
The piece that still needs funding
The Rick McDevitt Youth Center is shown in the vision plan with classrooms, a computer lab, kitchen, multipurpose room, offices and restrooms.
That renovation is not fully funded through the park project. The Peoplestown Revitalization Corporation says it is still seeking money to upgrade the building, which it describes as the remaining infrastructure improvement identified in the vision plan.
That is a significant gap because the youth center is where much of the park’s existing programming happens. The new courts, playgrounds and gardens change the grounds. Funding the building determines what organizations can offer inside it throughout the year.
The most useful thing in this story is the sequence. Peoplestown finished its plan in March 2024, received funding for an initial phase in February 2025, and had the document ready when a national initiative went looking for eight cities to fund. If you sit on a neighborhood association or a friends-of-the-park group anywhere on the Eastside, that is the move worth copying, because funders fund plans, not wish lists. What I will be watching is whether the youth center upgrade gets picked up, how the stormwater work changes what the field can handle in a hard rain, and whether the three-year window holds once a construction start date is finally on the record. A construction schedule and access plan for the full project have not been announced.
