Sandy Springs Is Building Its River the Same Way It Built Its Downtown
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
The boardwalk over Orkin Lake doesn't announce itself. You're walking the paved path from Morgan Falls Overlook Park, past the dog park, and then the trail lifts onto a raised deck and the lake opens up beneath your feet, dark and still, ringed by trees that have never had a public path running through them before. It feels finished. It is not. It's 1.88 miles of a trail system that, on paper, is supposed to run for 31.4 miles across the entire city.
That gap between what's built and what's planned is the story of Sandy Springs right now, and it's not a new story. It's the same one the city told twenty years ago, just pointed in a different direction.
When Sandy Springs incorporated in June 2005, it had no downtown. What it had was a strip mall with a large asphalt parking lot near the center of the city, and a council that decided to turn that lot into City Springs: a performing arts center, a four-acre park, a walkable grid of restaurants and residences built where cars used to park. That decision, made from scratch, is why City Green and the Byers Theatre exist today.
Twenty years later, the city is running the same play on its river edge. The Chattahoochee has always been there, but Morgan Falls Overlook Park sat next to a stretch of densely forested riverfront that residents couldn't actually walk into. The Springway Trail's first completed segment, opened in a ribbon-cutting on May 2, 2025, changed that. It connects Morgan Falls to Roswell Road at Cimarron Parkway, and it cost $8.5 million, including a $3 million grant through the Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Program. Like City Springs before it, this is public money creating public access to land that used to be off limits by default, not by rule.
Here's the number that doesn't show up in the press releases: that 1.88-mile segment, called 2A, is one piece of a planned 5.6-mile loop around Morgan Falls Overlook Park, which is itself one piece of the citywide 31.4-mile Springway Trail Master Plan. Do the arithmetic and the finished, ribbon-cut trail that locals are already walking represents roughly 6 percent of what the city has actually promised.
The next piece, Segment 2C, is a $14.5 million, 1.6-mile extension along the river to Grogans Ferry Road. In February 2026, Sandy Springs City Council approved new agreements with the PATH Foundation to manage design and construction on the remaining segments, and the city is now waiting on word about a second Georgia Outdoor Stewardship grant, with awards expected sometime this summer. Nothing about 2C is built yet. It's funded on paper and in motion, which in Sandy Springs terms means it's a few years out.
City Councilwoman Melody Kelley, whose district includes the completed segment, put the North End's investment in context at the May 2025 ribbon cutting: counting the trail, the new police headquarters and municipal court, and the Roswell Road North Boulevard project, the district has seen more than $70 million in public investment. That's real money moving through a part of the city that, twenty years ago, had none of it. It's also a reminder that Sandy Springs treats infrastructure the way it treats its downtown: as something you build in public, in view of the people who'll use it, rather than something you unveil complete.
If you want proof the city is comfortable running events ahead of the infrastructure, look at this past weekend. On August 15, Sandy Springs held its inaugural SUP Showdown, a stand-up paddleboard race launching at Morgan Falls Overlook Park, presented with Murph's Surf and the city's Recreation and Parks department. The course ran six miles out and back on Bull Sluice Lake and the Chattahoochee, with Catalyst Sports bringing adaptive kayak athletes into the field. It was a serious, competitive event, staged on a stretch of river where the surrounding trail network is still mostly a plan.
That's not a criticism. It's a pattern worth knowing if you live here. The city isn't waiting for the finished network to start treating this stretch of river as a destination. Residents who get out to Morgan Falls now, while 2C is still a line item and not a trail, are seeing a version of the park that will look different in a few years: quieter, less finished, and arguably more interesting because of it.
The same logic shows up on the calendar every week without the fanfare of a race. City Green Live, the free Friday concert series at City Springs, has been running since April and is closing out its season this month, with gates opening at 4 p.m., food trucks starting at 6, and headline acts around 8:30. The Sandy Springs Farmers Market runs Saturday mornings from 8:30 to noon, rain or shine, and has been folding in Dog Days of Summer programming this season, including an appearance from the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. Free outdoor movies continue too, with Spy Kids scheduled for City Green on September 4. None of it waits for anything to be complete. It just happens, on repeat, in a park that used to be a parking lot.
The city's build-in-public habit shows up in its dining scene too, just on a commercial timeline instead of a municipal one.
Rumi's Kitchen, the Persian restaurant that opened its original Sandy Springs location back in 2006, closed for what was supposed to be a brief remodel and didn't reopen until March 6, 2026, several months later than the timeline it announced. The delay was the price of an extensive renovation by Johnson Studio at Cooper Carry, the same firm that designed the original space nearly twenty years earlier. What came out the other side was a genuinely different restaurant: expanded private dining, a new dessert menu, and a shish kabob rebuilt around wagyu beef with an Urfa chili rub. Brunch, including za'atar biscuits and gravy, launched a few weeks later in mid-March. The lesson is the same one the trail teaches: things in this city tend to land later than scheduled and more finished than expected.
Newer arrivals are filling in around it. Wat Room, a speakeasy-style Asian fusion lounge on Roswell Road, opened with a sushi bar and a cocktail list built around global flavors, the kind of low-key, reservation-only spot that wasn't advertising a grand opening so much as letting word spread. And Moxie Burger, the regional chain with existing locations in East Cobb, Roswell, Marietta, and Kennesaw, confirmed its sixth location is coming to Chastain Market, the 122,000-square-foot mixed-use development going up at 4600 Roswell Road. That's a chain expanding into a project that, like the trail and the restaurant renovation before it, is still under construction while the announcements are already out.
If you live here, the practical version of all this is simple: don't wait for the finished product before you use it.
None of these require the Springway Trail to be finished, the Chastain Market development to be leasing, or Rumi's Kitchen to have been open on schedule. They're happening now, in the gap between planned and built, which is where Sandy Springs has always done its best work.
That's the part outsiders miss when they read about this city. The finished version of Sandy Springs is always a few years away. The version worth paying attention to is the one under construction right now, and the people who notice it first are the ones already living here.
At Local Loyalty Realtors, we spend as much time tracking what's opening around Sandy Springs as we do tracking what's for sale in it. If you're a neighbor thinking through a move, or you know someone weighing Sandy Springs against another North Atlanta suburb, we're happy to talk through what the next few years of building actually looks like on the ground.
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