Walk the wedge where Euclid and Moreland avenues meet in Little Five Points this month and you'll notice the difference immediately. Findley Plaza has bike racks now. New oaks. A star-shaped paver pattern with donor names etched into the border. Officials cut the ribbon on April 17, and the corner that most L5P regulars never called by name, the concrete triangle between The Porter and Little 5 Pub where music fans used to line up outside Criminal Records, finally looks like something someone designed on purpose rather than something that just happened.
What's easy to miss is how long that took. And what that timeline tells you about the next project already lined up for this fall.
The Ten Years Behind One Plaza
Findley Plaza's redesign traces back to 2015, when a group called Friends of Little Five Points Parks formed specifically to get the space fixed. Two years later, they landed a $100,000 grant from Park Pride. The following year, the community raised another $94,000 through a granite tile and founding member program. By the time construction actually broke ground in August 2025, a decade had passed since anyone first said the plaza needed work.
The finished project cost $830,000 total, with $458,000 of that coming from Renew Atlanta bond funding and the rest from Park Pride, the city, and local donors and businesses. The scope itself wasn't dramatic: new sidewalks, ADA-accessible ramps, pedestrian furniture, bike racks, redesigned tree wells, and about a tenth of an acre of landscaping.
Liz McCurtain, who served on the board of the original Friends group, put it plainly when talking to Saporta Report about why it dragged:
"We were truly a little upstart community effort trying to get some traction on what's a pretty complex little tiny piece of space. It's like a tiny little postage stamp of space that was under like five jurisdictions."
Five jurisdictions. For a plaza you can walk across in under a minute.
Lauren Welsh, the Little 5 Points Alliance's executive director, made a related point about the funding side of these projects: money isn't usually what holds things up. The bottleneck is coordination, permitting, and the layered approvals that come with any public right-of-way project touching multiple city departments and a state-controlled road.
That matters for anyone trying to figure out what's coming next.
The Bigger Project Waiting In The Wings
The Euclid Avenue Safe Street Project is the next phase, and it's a larger undertaking than Findley Plaza ever was. The Atlanta Department of Transportation describes the scope as resurfacing the roadway, adding new granite curbing, building raised and ADA-compliant crosswalks, upgrading intersections and signals, repairing drainage, planting street trees, and installing protected bike lanes where the street allows it. The project footprint runs from Austin Avenue to Moreland Avenue on Euclid, plus connecting streets including Seminole, Sinclair, Colquitt, Washita, Euclid Terrace, and Josephine, all the way out to the Inman Park/Reynoldstown MARTA station.
Welsh has described the goal in terms locals will recognize immediately: Little Five Points is a walkable, bikeable neighborhood, and the infrastructure underneath it, cracked sidewalks, tree roots pushing through pavement, driveway cuts that don't line up cleanly, hasn't caught up to that reality.
The city's own project page lists construction as expected to begin in Fall 2026. A more specific target has circulated too. Reporting that quoted the project's manager pointed to a late November start with a construction window of six to nine months, a duration the manager compared directly to the Findley Plaza timeline, which itself ran longer than planned. The budget for Euclid Avenue sits around $3 million, and even that number has already drawn concern from people close to the project, since the original estimate was set back in 2021 and updated in 2022, before a period of sharp cost increases across the construction industry.
None of this means the work won't happen. It means the smart way to read "this fall" is as a starting point the city is aiming for, not a date carved into anything.
Why The Timeline Will Probably Move Again
The pattern from Findley Plaza gives residents a useful lens here. That project also had an announced start date that came and went more than once before shovels actually hit the ground. Welsh has said as much herself, noting that Findley Plaza's own timeline stretched from an expected three to five months of construction to closer to eight, mostly because of underground surprises: utilities, drainage, and old infrastructure nobody had fully mapped.
Euclid Avenue carries more of that risk, not less. It's a longer corridor, it touches more intersections, and part of it falls under Georgia DOT jurisdiction rather than the city's alone, since Moreland Avenue is a state road. The same layered-jurisdiction problem McCurtain described for one tiny plaza applies here across a much bigger stretch of pavement.
There's also a live debate in the neighborhood about how much change is too much. Mack Hedrick, who runs Seven Stages theater on Euclid, has voiced a concern shared by others: that back-to-back polish, first Findley Plaza, now the street itself, risks smoothing over the offbeat character that made Little Five Points what it is in the first place. It's a tension the Alliance has acknowledged directly rather than dismissed, and it remains part of the discussion around the design. Nobody wants to rush a decision that changes the feel of the place for good.
What Isn't Waiting On Any Of This
Regardless of when Euclid Avenue construction actually starts, one thing on the calendar is locked in. The Little 5 Points Halloween Festival & Parade runs Saturday and Sunday, October 17 and 18, with the parade itself stepping off on Moreland Avenue Sunday afternoon. Expect the usual mix: a Monster Sticker Hunt for kids at participating storefronts, an Artist Market set up along Euclid, and the Seed & Feed Marching Abominable Band leading the parade route past the crowd that always packs in tightest at the Moreland and Euclid intersection.
If you're planning to go, plan around parking rather than counting on it. The alleyway lot behind Criminal Records and The Porter that used to be the neighborhood's last free option converted to paid parking under Park Place Parking Company a couple of years back, following a city council vote that business owners fought and lost. Walking, biking, or a rideshare drop a few blocks out remains the more reliable move for festival weekend, construction or no construction.
The plaza is done. The street is next, on a timeline that's more of a hope than a promise. And the parade goes on regardless, the way it always has.
If you're weighing a move into Little Five Points or a nearby intown neighborhood and want a read on how projects like this affect what a property is actually worth to live near, day to day, Josh Jennings Real Estate is a good place to start that conversation. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
