Johns Creek’s New Boardwalk Earns a State Award Before Its First Fall Season
Johns Creek’s new Boardwalk at Town Center received a statewide award soon after opening. The park features trails, plazas, and an amphitheater, creating a public space for events and everyday use in the city’s developing downtown district.
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Johns Creek’s long-planned Town Center is beginning to feel less like a construction zone and more like a place residents can use.
The Georgia Downtown Association has named the Boardwalk at Town Center its 2026 Outstanding Public Improvement Project, a statewide honor for the 20-acre park beside City Hall. The award arrives only a few months after the Boardwalk opened in May, but it recognizes more than a new place to take a walk. It marks the city’s first substantial public gathering space in the district that is meant to become Johns Creek’s downtown.
The Boardwalk is built around a wide elevated trail winding through ponds, wetlands and wooded areas, with overlooks, plazas, terraced seating and an amphitheater. It also connects the City Hall area to the pedestrian tunnel beneath Medlock Bridge Road, giving people on foot or bicycles a safer way across one of the city’s most difficult roads.
The Georgia Downtown Association selected the Boardwalk alongside projects in established downtowns across the state. For Johns Creek—a city without a traditional historic downtown—the recognition is a sign that the public side of its Town Center plan has taken shape.
That distinction is worth making. The Boardwalk is not Medley, the private mixed-use development rising nearby. It is the civic piece: a public park designed to remain useful whether residents are visiting a future restaurant, attending a concert or simply taking an evening walk.
Medley is scheduled to open Oct. 29 with restaurants, shops, homes, offices and a central plaza. Its arrival will bring more traffic and activity to the area, but the Boardwalk provides something the development alone could not: a free public setting that belongs to the wider city. The Town Center park now gives Johns Creek a natural place to hold the kind of recurring events that have long required residents to drive to Alpharetta, Duluth or Suwanee.
Its first fall calendar is already taking shape. Nashville Nation is scheduled to perform at the Boardwalk on Sept. 12, followed by the free Arts on the Boardwalk event from 1 to 4 p.m. Sept. 26. Those dates will be a practical early test of the park’s parking, walkability and ability to handle a crowd.
For years, Johns Creek has talked about creating a center without losing the quieter character of its neighborhoods. The Boardwalk does not settle every question about what the Town Center will become. Medley’s opening, additional road work and future development around the park will shape that answer.
But the park has already changed the map of the city. It gives Johns Creek a place where an ordinary afternoon walk, a community concert and a much larger downtown vision can meet in the same space.
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