Columbus Ward, a longtime resident of Peoplestown, remembers when Four Corners Park used to be a vacant lot where neighbors gathered to play softball.
Now, thanks to a $9.4 million investment, it’s set to be a space with new amenities including basketball courts, gardens, a skatepark, and more.
The transformation of the treasured community space is expected to take three years.
The Bezos Earth Fund awarded the money to Park Pride, a local nonprofit dedicated to bolstering Atlanta’s greenspaces. The organization has been working for the past several years with Peoplestown residents to redevelop Four Corners Park.
Ward said that over time his neighborhood park had become a place where residents gathered for community events and to socialize, and acted as a safe haven during COVID.
“We have always been a neighborhood where we try to bring people together, whatever the circumstances are, and that has been a place where we could do that,” Ward said. “You have to give a lot of credit to the people in Peopletown itself. That’s a resilient community that don’t give up and that continues to work hard trying to get things that’s needed in the community.”
Park Pride President and CEO Michael Halicki said that the strong community interest is what drove the organization to invest in Four Corners Park over the years. The organization worked with residents to develop a design plan and dedicated $1 million to help bring the vision to life.
“We have examples across the city of great parks in terms of infrastructure, but sometimes the community is not engaged,” Halicki said. “And this is an example of a park that has not always had the advantages of new equipment and things like that, but it has this community that had strong engagement and has had strong community engagement through the recent history in the neighborhood.”
The Bezos Earth Fund awarded the grant to the park as part of its “Greening America’s Cities” initiative. The fund also awarded money to projects in a handful of other cities, including Cleveland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles.
“Greening America’s Cities shows what’s possible when communities, local leaders, and partners come together to transform overlooked spaces into something extraordinary,” said Tom Taylor, CEO and president of the Bezos Earth Fund. “Our hope is that these projects serve as a blueprint for turning vacant land into community assets and encourage even more investment in green spaces — from government, philanthropy, and others — in cities across the country.”
The Bezos grant comes at a time when a different Peoplestown park has been steeped in controversy.
Earlier this year, Peoplestown residents pushed back against the design of the Custer Avenue Capacity Relief Multi-Benefit Project — dubbed “Poop Park” by critics.
Designed to store 20 million gallons of combined stormwater and sewage in a massive vault beneath a new park, the project is meant to satisfy the city’s federal consent decree obligations to clean up persistent sewage issues. Residents complained the plan doesn’t address the root causes of ongoing flooding in the neighborhood.
“We never did get that opportunity to design what we want on that block, so it was just all of a sudden the city decided there was going to be a vault that was going to be three stories underground which is unheard of,” Ward said.
While the city’s Department of Watershed Management controls the Custer Avenue initiative, Ward said residents have more oversight of the Four Corners Park redevelopment because of the partnership fostered between the community and Park Pride.
“We already know that we are the ones that have to hold everybody accountable and make sure this goes through like it’s supposed to. But at the same time, this is nothing that will make us be quiet or not participate in what’s going on at the flood block,” Ward said.
Halicki said the Four Corners Park redevelopment will also include green infrastructure components that will address flooding. He said he hopes that the process that Park Pride and the Peoplestown community underwent to make this project happen can be replicated in other communities — showing that green infrastructure can be done in a way to “lift up” neighborhoods.
“One of [Peoplestown]’s strengths, even before all this stuff, is it has been a resilient community, and I think as the infrastructure reflects that resilience and gives folks a level of agency, I think it could be a model for other communities that face a disproportionate amount of environmental burdens,” Halicki said.
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