The tents go up behind Eclipse di Luna on Miami Circle the way they do every fall, and on Sunday, October 4, Livable Buckhead's Party on the PATH fills that stretch of pavement again with tapas, a silent auction, and whatever the Atlanta Soul Band decides to open with. VIP guests get an early hour with Crimson Harvest sangria starting at 5:30. Earlier still, a smaller group heads into Johnson Lowe Gallery for a private look at the fall shows, Todd Murphy's Voyager and a group exhibition called Encounters that includes work by Sam Gilliam and Judy Pfaff, before Mayor Andre Dickens and the rest of the crowd make their way over for cocktails and the auction preview.
It is a good party. It is also standing on top of an unfinished sentence.
What the Evening Actually Pays For
Party on the PATH is Livable Buckhead's annual fundraiser, and the bidding this year opens September 19 and runs through October 4 at 8:45 p.m., with proceeds going toward the nonprofit's ongoing work building greenspace, public art, and trail connections across Buckhead. Eclipse di Luna has catered the event for years now, which fits. The restaurant has spent more than two decades as one of the pioneers of tapas dining in Atlanta, and its Miami Circle location happens to sit directly on the existing southern section of PATH400, the greenway Livable Buckhead has spent nearly two decades building along the Ga. 400 corridor.
That location is not incidental. If you walk out the back of Eclipse di Luna and head south, you are on finished trail. If you try to walk north from there toward the actual commercial core of Buckhead, the trail quietly gives up on you.
The Walk That Doesn't Quite Work Yet
Here is the route as Livable Buckhead's own executive director, Denise Starling, has described it. Starting at Peachtree Road, the trail is supposed to dive between the InterContinental Buckhead Atlanta and the Embassy Suites, cut briefly through the Peachtree Park neighborhood, and land at the Gordon Bynum Bridge, which is where PATH400's existing southern section actually begins. From the bridge, the finished trail continues past the "Great Blue" mural and down to Miami Circle, right past Eclipse di Luna's patio.
That first piece, the short hop between the two hotels and the bridge, does not exist yet. Anyone who has tried to walk or bike from central Buckhead down toward Miami Circle knows the workaround: you end up on sidewalks that were built for pedestrians walking to a hotel lobby, not for a continuous greenway, and the trail signage simply stops making sense for a few blocks.
Starling has been candid about how much this particular gap grates on her. In a recent account of the project's status, she put it this way:
"The Peachtree Park connection is not long, but it is exactly the kind of small gap with an outsized ability to annoy us. Right now, the commercial core and the existing southern trail sit frustratingly close to one another without actually connecting."
That is a fair description of what it feels like on foot too. You can see where the trail should go. You just cannot walk it.
Why the Short Piece Is the Stubborn One
It would be easy to assume the hardest parts of PATH400 are the dramatic ones, the kind that require an 80-foot bridge through the treetops. Buckhead already has one of those. The Wieuca Road to Loridans Drive segment, with its bridge over Mountain Way Common, opened after roughly three years of construction and nearly $13.4 million in combined federal, city, and Buckhead Community Improvement District funding. It got built. It got its ribbon cutting. It is finished.
The Peachtree Park connection is shorter and, on paper, simpler. It has not moved as fast, in part because it threads between two working hotels and through an existing neighborhood rather than running along open right of way next to the highway. Meanwhile, at the trail's southern end, a second unfinished project is quietly just as important. Rather than building an entirely new trail, that project will widen existing sidewalks into a proper pedestrian and bike facility, add signage identifying the route as PATH400, and guide users toward the future meeting point with the Atlanta Beltline. Livable Buckhead has taken to calling that eventual multi-trail meeting point the "angel hair junction," because apparently a normal intersection of paths would have been too easy for a project this ambitious.
Put together, these two projects are what actually stand between a Buckhead resident and a car-free walk from the neighborhood's commercial core all the way to the Beltline.
The Timeline, As Specific As It Gets Right Now
Starling has laid out dates for both pieces, and they are more specific than the usual "in the coming years" language that infrastructure projects tend to get. The Atlanta section of PATH400 north of Loridans Drive is expected to be finished in the first quarter of 2027, and Livable Buckhead is coordinating with the City of Sandy Springs so that segment and Sandy Springs' own prioritized connection can open together, with a joint celebration planned once the construction schedule firms up.
The Peachtree Park connection and the southern Beltline connection are moving through the City of Atlanta's procurement process now, with construction on both expected to begin in early 2027 and wrap up later that same year.
Not every piece of the network is on that kind of schedule. Several other connections remain further out, and Livable Buckhead has been straightforward about which ones:
- A future link west to Blue Heron Nature Preserve and eventually Chastain Park, which will require a lighter design touch given the streams, wetlands, and tree canopy involved
- The Lenox Road to Peachtree Road connection, which will go through its own separate planning and design process built around a new vision developed with the Buckhead Community Improvement District and commercial property owners along that stretch
- Additional work near Piedmont Road, still in the partnership and funding stages
Starling's own assessment is that these will take longer simply because they remain in planning rather than procurement. The Peachtree Park and southern Beltline pieces, by contrast, are the ones with an actual construction calendar attached to them.
Before the Crowds Arrive
If you want to see the gap for yourself before Party on the PATH turns Miami Circle into a tented event space, the walk is worth doing on a quiet weekday evening. Start at the Gordon Bynum Bridge, follow the finished trail south past the Great Blue mural, and end at Eclipse di Luna's patio, the same route the party will use, just without the sangria and the silent auction bids flying in on someone's phone. Then try the other direction, north from the bridge toward Peachtree Road, and notice exactly where the trail stops behaving like a trail.
None of this is a reason to think PATH400 has stalled. The two hardest, most visible pieces, the Wieuca Road to Loridans Drive segment and the surrounding Mountain Way Common work, already exist. What is left is smaller in scale but no less real to anyone who lives here and uses the trail on a normal Tuesday. Buckhead's infrastructure gets built in phases, and this is the phase that connects the neighborhood to itself before it connects to anything larger.
If watching a project like this move forward, gap by gap, ever makes you curious about a specific address near it or what a stretch like Miami Circle or Peachtree Park is actually like to live on, that is a conversation the team at Dorsey Alston Realtors has been having with Buckhead residents for a long time. Work With Us whenever that curiosity turns into an actual question.
