"Creekside Park is going to be our civic hub for our community," Mayor John Bradberry said back when the site behind City Hall was still dirt and construction fencing. That was the plan. What actually happened is a little different, and if you live anywhere near Medlock Bridge Road, it changes your week starting now, not on the date circled on every press release.
Everyone covering Johns Creek's new town center has been counting down to October 29, when Medley opens its first phase across from City Hall. That date matters. But the thing that actually rewired how people move through this part of the city happened weeks earlier and got a fraction of the attention: a pedestrian tunnel under Medlock Bridge Road quietly opened, connecting two projects that had been finished on paper but functionally cut off from each other by seven lanes of state highway.
The park that opened with nowhere to walk
The Boardwalk at Town Center, the 20-acre park behind City Hall, had its grand opening on May 8, timed to the first summer concert of the season. A Chicago tribute act called Boy Band Review played the amphitheater that night, working through Jonas Brothers and Backstreet Boys covers for a crowd that had been waiting years for this ground to become something other than a construction zone. The park delivered on the plan: a 15-foot elevated trail, terraced seating over a wetland pond, an amphitheater built into the hillside, all part of a $39 million public investment that broke ground in August 2024.
What the park did not have, for months after that concert, was a way to reach the other side of the road. Medley, the mixed-use development going up across Medlock Bridge Road, was still a construction site through the summer. Even with Trader Joe's already open there since June, getting from the Boardwalk's amphitheater lawn to the grocery aisle meant either driving around or crossing an active state highway on foot. The park and the retail were, in practice, two separate destinations that happened to share a zip code.
Why the tunnel is the actual event
That separation is why the $7 million pedestrian tunnel matters more than its price tag or its plain function suggests. It went in beneath Medlock Bridge Road (State Route 141) specifically to link the Boardwalk on the east side to Medley on the west, and it opened within the past few weeks, well ahead of Medley's official ribbon cutting. For the first time since ground broke on either project, a resident can walk from a summer concert to a shopping trip without waiting for a crosswalk signal on a seven-lane road.
That is not a small detail dressed up as one. It is the piece that makes everything else on the calendar actually usable together. A park with no bridge to the retail side is a nice trail. A retail development with no park next to it is a strip center with better landscaping. Put a tunnel between them and you get what the city has been describing for two years as a town center, except the description is now something you can physically do on a Tuesday evening, months before the tenant list is complete.
What's already open, right now
If you live in Johns Creek, here is what you can actually use today, not in October:
- The Boardwalk at Town Center, open daily from 6 a.m. to midnight, with a roughly one-mile trail running from Johns Creek Parkway north to McGinnis Ferry Road and a shorter half-mile loop around the north pond behind City Hall.
- The Medlock Bridge Road pedestrian tunnel, now connecting that trail system directly to the Medley side of the highway.
- Trader Joe's at Medley, open daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at 1000 Medley Boulevard, the first tenant to open ahead of the full development.
- Public parking at City Hall, 11360 Lakefield Drive, with the Boardwalk accessible on the path to the left of the main entrance.
None of that required Medley to finish. It is available this week.
What's still assembling for October 29
The rest of Medley is very much still coming together, and the tenant list confirmed so far gives a clear sense of what the finished district is aiming for. Shake Shack, Sephora, Drybar, Fadó Irish Pub, CRÚ Food & Wine Bar, and High Country Outfitters have all signed on, alongside STIR, a cocktail bar and scratch kitchen out of Chattanooga that's set to anchor the central plaza when the doors open. Toro Development Company, the same firm behind Avalon in Alpharetta, has the retail portion of the 43-acre project leased past 78 percent as of this summer, with restaurants and shops filling in around a 25,000-square-foot plaza designed to host roughly 200 events a year once it's fully running.
Mark Toro has talked about Medley as a "Third Place," the space between home and work where people show up without a specific errand and end up staying longer than planned. Whether that holds up is something residents will judge for themselves once the plaza has more than one open storefront. For now, the honest state of things is: one grocery store, a construction site with good signage, and a tunnel that already makes the walk worth taking.
The rest of the map already runs on this same logic
The tunnel story is really a specific example of something Johns Creek has been doing well in other corners of the city for longer. Newtown Park, about ten minutes from Town Center on Old Alabama Road, hosts Pup-A-Palooza on September 19, a free afternoon event built around the park's dog park, which USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice ranked as the second-best dog park in the country, non-island division, according to the city's own accounting of the honor. That's not a coincidence of good planning either. It's the same pattern: build a gathering point people already use for something else, then layer programming on top of it rather than starting from scratch.
Newtown's amphitheater, the Mark Burkhalter, hosts the city's summer concert series with the same free-and-open model as the Boardwalk. The difference is Newtown had a decade's head start and Town Center is still catching up. The tunnel is the fastest way that catch-up has moved yet.
What changes for your week
If your commute or your dog walk already runs anywhere near Medlock Bridge Road and Johns Creek Parkway, the practical shift is immediate. A trip that used to be Boardwalk or Medley, decided by which side of the highway you were already on, is now Boardwalk and Medley, connected by a five-minute walk instead of a five-minute drive around. The Trader Joe's run can happen on the same outing as a lap around the pond. The concert lawn and the wine bar opening this fall will be a shared evening instead of two separate trips on two separate nights.
October 29 will get the coverage, the ribbon, and the crowd. The tunnel already did the harder part.
Johns Creek residents who want more of this kind of ground-level tracking on what's actually opening, closing, and changing across North Fulton can find ongoing coverage and neighborhood guides from the Mike Price Team, including updates as Medley's remaining phases come online through the rest of 2026 and into 2027.
