Park Pride receives $9.4 million to expand Four Corners Park in Peoplestown
What once was a vacant lot where generations of Peoplestown residents gathered to play softball will soon become a state-of-the-art city park with covered basketball courts; expanded community gardens, youth center and playgrounds; a skateboarding area; classrooms; wetlands; better lighting; and electric vehicle charging stations.
The expansion and upgrades at Peoplestown’s Four Corners Park is thanks to a $9.4 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund to Atlanta nonprofit Park Pride.
The award was announced Tuesday, and is one of eight being distributed nationwide as part of the Bezos Earth Fund’s $100 million “Greening America’s Cities” initiative.
Amanda Eichel, director of equitable urban solutions at the earth fund, said Atlanta stood out because of the community work that had already been done on the park’s revitalization plan and the obvious need in the historically under-resourced Peoplestown neighborhood.
“The project transforms underutilized open space in Peoplestown into a vibrant neighborhood park designed around what residents have said they want and need,” Eichel said in a statement. “It addresses longstanding gaps in access to quality green space while creating environmental, recreational, and community benefits.”
Improving parks and park access has been a focus of Mayor Andre Dickens’ administration. The city’s national ParkScore — an annual evaluation of park systems related to public access, investment, amenities, acreage and equity — rose to 18th from 21st earlier this year. Atlanta ranked 49th at the start of Dickens’ first term with only 72% of residents living within a 10-minute walk of a park.
Today, about 85% of residents live within that same 10-minute walk, according to the city.
Park Pride awarded the Friends of Four Corners Park a grant in 2025 to begin the project, which included a new playground, pavilion and walking path. The additional funding allows completion of the vision and makes the Four Corners project the largest in the organization’s history, Park Pride President Michael Halicki said.
“Bringing in not just the local philanthropic dollars but national dollars at this scale is unprecedented for us as an organization,” Halicki said.
Columbus Ward, a longtime Peoplestown resident, said he remembers playing softball with friends in the vacant lot over 40 years ago. Ward said a lot of people in the neighborhood weren’t sure the funding would ever come through.
“We thought we might get some help, but we thought it might take 20 years for us to make this happen,” Ward said. “Now we got something that we can say we all worked on and we can say this is our park, Four Corners Park.”