Chamblee's Old City Hall Is an Art Studio Now. A Stormwater Pipe Is Becoming a Park.
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Walk down Peachtree Road past the old Chamblee City Hall on a weekday evening this month and the building doesn't look like a government office anymore. The windows are lit past five o'clock. Somebody is usually carrying a canvas or a folded easel through the front door. A few blocks away, behind the Walmart on Chamblee Tucker Road, a different kind of activity has started: chain-link fencing, survey stakes, and a crew clearing the edges of what used to be a plain drainage pond.
Neither project made much noise on its own. But put them next to each other and a pattern shows up that's easy to miss if you only caught one headline back in the spring: Chamblee has spent this year converting things it already owned and already had to deal with into places people actually want to be. Not a master-planned district built from scratch. Retrofits.
Chamblee's old City Hall, a 6,796-square-foot building on Peachtree Road built in 2002, sat vacant after staff moved to a new location in 2022. That's not a small building to leave dark for three years in the middle of a downtown that's adding housing on almost every side street.
Instead of selling it off or letting it keep sitting, the city struck a deal with Spruill Center for the Arts, the Dunwoody-based nonprofit that's been running its gallery and classes out of a converted Victorian home since 1993. The partnership was announced on February 9, 2026. Renovation started in March. Artist applications opened March 9, and 39 people applied for spots in the building. Construction wrapped by late May, and the city held a public ribbon-cutting on June 13, 2026.
Sixteen artists, two of them Chamblee residents, moved into the building's fifteen studios that month. Monthly rents scale with square footage and start as low as $150. The building also holds a public gallery, open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., where the resident artists show their work.
Spruill's CEO Alan Mothner called the building "a proverbial win-win-win" in Atlanta Magazine's coverage of the opening, and the math behind that isn't hard to see. Spruill got studio space without paying for new construction. The city got a civic asset back on the tax-exempt-but-occupied side of the ledger instead of an empty liability. Sixteen working artists got below-market rent in a Perimeter-area market where that kind of space is hard to find.
The second project started from an even less glamorous place. The site at 1900 Chamblee Tucker Road, across from Walmart, used to be a MARTA stormwater detention pond, the kind of unremarkable infrastructure most residents drive past without noticing. The city bought it in 2016 as part of a broader trails and parks expansion program, and for most of the past decade it sat there doing exactly one job: catching runoff in a concrete-lined channel that, per Georgia's stormwater management rules, provided zero water quality treatment.
Georgia's 2016 stormwater manual eventually required the city to fix that. The fix became Fish Bolt Park, a $4.6 million constructed wetland that the city broke ground on August 12, 2026. The design, by engineering firm Kimley-Horn, does the required water treatment work through marsh vegetation instead of concrete. But the plans go well past code minimum: ADA-accessible paths, a nature play area, multiple public deck spaces, a mural wall, and landscaping that ties the site into the Chamblee Rail Trail, which had already grown to two miles by 2023 and runs along the park's southern edge. Construction firm Reeves Young, which also works on Beltline segments, is building it, with completion expected by summer 2027.
The park's name comes from a fishbolt, the metal fastener that joins one rail track to the next. Chamblee grew up as a railroad town, and city officials chose the name as a small nod to that history sitting on a piece of land that used to belong to a transit agency.
Mayor Brian Mock called it "an asset for our community" at the groundbreaking, which is the kind of line every mayor says at every groundbreaking. What's less routine is the sequence: a compliance obligation the city couldn't avoid became the occasion for a park it didn't have to build this ambitiously.
Neither project happened in isolation. Atlanta Magazine's June 2026 profile of Spruill Studios framed Chamblee as building toward something bigger, pointing to a handful of smaller, privately run additions that opened around the same stretch of months:
None of these are big enough to anchor a headline on their own. Together with Spruill Studios, they add up to a downtown where you can take a pottery class, watch a distillery pour a tasting, browse a gallery, and walk into a working artist's studio, all within a few blocks of Peachtree Road.
Not everything Chamblee has floated this cycle actually got built. In August 2025, a global architecture team unveiled a striking circular concept for a rebuilt Chamblee Town Center. It got coverage, it got renderings, and then it went nowhere. Reporting from Urbanize Atlanta on the project noted it appeared dead on arrival despite the attention it drew.
That contrast is worth sitting with. The flashy, unified master plan for Town Center stalled at the rendering stage. The two projects that actually broke ground and opened this year were the least glamorous ideas available: reuse an empty building, upgrade a drainage pond. Chamblee's real momentum this year came from finishing things it was already on the hook for, not from a grand redesign.
The pattern isn't limited to these two projects, either. Dresden Park got a new community center, a three-tier playground, and a William Massey sculpture that were completed in November 2025, another example of the city using an existing park rather than building a new one from bare ground. And the next project in the pipeline follows the same logic: the city held a public input meeting on July 29, 2026, to shape a master plan for the upper section of Keswick Park, gathering resident priorities before committing to a design.
If you want to see the payoff of all this in person, Chamblee's fifth annual Chalk Walk & Artist Market lands on September 12, 2026, downtown. Spruill Studios has said it plans to open its doors for public tours during major city events like this one, which means the Chalk Walk is likely the first real chance for residents to walk through the old City Hall building and see the working studios up close, not just the public gallery out front.
Fish Bolt Park won't be walkable for a while yet. Construction is expected to run through summer 2027, and in the meantime the city's own capital projects list shows an additional 1.8-mile Rail Trail extension planned to eventually connect toward the Doraville line, which suggests the trail-building habit isn't slowing down once this one park is finished.
None of this required a new tax district or a headline-grabbing master plan. It required a city willing to keep an old building occupied and a drainage requirement worth doing right. If you've noticed downtown Chamblee feels different than it did a year ago, this is most of why.
For a closer look at what else has changed around Chamblee's core, our Chamblee neighborhood guide rounds up the landmarks and everyday spots that make the area what it is.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home you already own here, or thinking ahead to a future move in the Chamblee area, Brandon Patterson & Company is available to talk it through. Request a private consultation whenever you're ready.
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