For a couple of years now, if you lived on the west end of Ponce de Leon Avenue and had small kids, you probably skipped Springdale Park. The playground there sat behind fencing while crews dealt with drainage problems and worn-out equipment, and the Olmsted Linear Park Alliance had to reroute at least one spring event away from the site because construction ran long. That gap mattered more than a single closed playground usually would, because Springdale isn't a standalone park. It's the first of six connected segments that run nearly two miles along Ponce, and for years, walking the full chain meant starting somewhere in the middle.
This fall, that changes. The playground is back, the six segments read as one walk again, and the calendar sitting on top of that walk is unusually full: a volunteer morning, a fundraiser, a 15th annual arts festival, a neighborhood-run Halloween block party, and a jazz series that's been running every other week since late summer. None of these events are new to Druid Hills. What's new is that they now sit on a walk you can actually finish end to end.
What Was Actually Wrong With Springdale
The Springdale renovation traces back to complaints residents raised with OLPA in 2022, when the consensus was that the equipment had gotten outdated and, in places, broken. Sandra Kruger, OLPA's executive director, told Rough Draft Atlanta that storm water flooding had also become a problem the park had to be redesigned around, not just repaired through. The fix wasn't cosmetic. It meant new stormwater infrastructure underneath a new playground, including a nest swing, a climbing sphere, musical flowers, a seesaw, a carousel, and an updated version of the spinning saucer that longtime residents remembered from before.
The timeline slipped more than once. Construction that was underway in March 2025 was expected to wrap by the end of that April. By early May, the Druid Hills Civic Association was still relocating a children's planting event away from Springdale because of a construction delay, moving it to Deepdene Park instead. If you had a toddler when the fencing first went up, you likely have a kindergartner now, and the reopened equipment is functionally a new amenity for your household rather than a repaired old one.
The Six Segments, In Order
Part of what makes Olmsted Linear Park confusing to newcomers is that it doesn't read as a single park. It reads as six, because it is six, laid out west to east along Ponce de Leon Avenue: Springdale, Virgilee, Oak Grove, Shadyside, Dellwood, and Deepdene. Virgilee is the one name that breaks the pattern of natural features. It's named for Joel Hurt's daughter, who died young, and was originally slated to be called Oaklawn before the family asked otherwise.
| Segment | Character | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Springdale | Open lawn, paved paths | Newly reopened playground anchors the west end |
| Virgilee | Pastoral, quiet | Named for developer Joel Hurt's daughter |
| Oak Grove | Open lawn, paved paths | Main grounds for the fall arts festival |
| Shadyside | Wooded southern edge | Well, waterfall, pool, and bridge added by WPA crews in the 1930s |
| Dellwood | Open dell, DeKalb-managed | Pastoral continuation, fewer visitors |
| Deepdene | 22-acre old-growth woodland | Unpaved trails, a stream, and a restored 1900s trolley shelter near Ponce and East Lake |
The four western segments sit inside Atlanta and stay open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Dellwood and Deepdene belong to DeKalb County and close at sunset, which is the kind of detail that only matters once you're the one standing at the tree line at 7:45 on an October evening wondering if you're allowed to still be there.
What's Landing on the Walk This Fall
The Fall Festival on Ponce runs its 15th year on October 10 and 11, with Saturday hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. It's a juried arts show spread across the Oak Grove, Shadyside, and Springdale segments, with roughly 125 exhibitors showing fine art, craft, and folk work. Organizers ask visitors using GPS or rideshare apps to enter the Oak Grove Park address rather than Springdale's, since that's the segment where most of the show sets up. Visitor parking is available at Atlanta Primitive Baptist Church on Ponce, and out of respect for the residential streets the show borders, music stays acoustic with no amplification.
A few weeks later, on October 24, the Emory Village Alliance and the Druid Hills Civic Association co-host the Emory Village Fall Festival on South Oxford Road and the field across from Domino's Pizza. It starts at 4 p.m. with the usual mix of food trucks and games, includes the annual costume parade and Truck-or-Treat, and this year adds a movie night at 7 p.m., organized with help from Glen Memorial Methodist Church.
OLPA itself has two dates on the books that don't get the same foot traffic as the festivals but matter if you actually want a hand in how the park looks next year. A volunteer beautification morning runs September 19 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the park's Ponce de Leon address, and the alliance's Fall Soiree fundraiser is set for October 29 from 6 to 9 p.m., with the location to be confirmed closer to the date.
The Detour Worth Taking
Callanwolde Fine Arts Center sits a few blocks off the linear park on Briarcliff Road, and its Jazz on the Lawn series has been running every other week through the amphitheater on the estate's twelve acres since late August. The remaining fall dates bring Gabrielle Cavassa on September 25, Joe Gransden's Big Band with Maria Howell on October 9, and Pete Ayres closing the series on October 23. None of it requires leaving your walk behind. Callanwolde is close enough to fold into an evening that starts on the linear park and ends on a blanket on the lawn.
If you're headed into Emory Village on any of these dates and don't live close enough to walk, Emory allows free visitor parking in the Oxford Road and Fishburne decks after business hours and on weekends specifically so people can patronize Village restaurants and events. The Oxford Road deck, attached to Barnes & Noble, is open all day on weekends and after 7 p.m. on weekdays. It's a detail residents tend to learn the hard way, usually while circling for street parking during a home football weekend.
Putting the Walk Back Together
What makes this fall different isn't any single event on this list. Ponce de Leon has had an arts festival for fifteen years and Callanwolde has hosted jazz on its lawn for longer than that. What's different is that for the first time since the Springdale renovation began, someone can start at the west end with a five-year-old in tow, let them loose on a new nest swing, and keep walking straight through Virgilee, Oak Grove, Shadyside, Dellwood, and into Deepdene's old growth without hitting a section that felt closed off or forgotten. The calendar didn't get busier this year so much as the geography underneath it got whole again.
If you're weighing your own weekend against all of this:
- September 19: OLPA volunteer morning, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Olmsted Linear Park
- September 25: Jazz on the Lawn featuring Gabrielle Cavassa, Callanwolde
- October 9: Jazz on the Lawn featuring Joe Gransden's Big Band with Maria Howell
- October 10 to 11: Fall Festival on Ponce, Oak Grove, Shadyside, and Springdale segments
- October 23: Jazz on the Lawn featuring Pete Ayres, closing the series
- October 24: Emory Village Fall Festival, South Oxford Road, 4 p.m. to movie night at 7 p.m.
- October 29: OLPA Fall Soiree, 6 to 9 p.m., location to be announced
Druid Hills residents already know the park is one of the reasons the neighborhood holds together the way it does. This fall is a decent excuse to walk all of it again, start to finish, for the first time in a while.
If you're curious how a neighborhood this walkable and this historically protected holds its value over time, Molly Carter Gaines has spent years tracking exactly that inside Druid Hills. You can browse more on the Druid Hills neighborhood page, and if the fall market has you wondering what your own home might be worth, Get Your Home Value any time.
