College Square Is "Open." The Real Finish Line Is Six Weeks Away.

Walk down College Avenue this month and you will cross two different projects without ever leaving the block. New red brick runs under your feet in some stretches, laid tight and level, ready for the crowds spilling out of Sanford Stadium on a Saturday night. A few storefronts down, the brick gives way to plywood walkways and orange construction fencing, the surface still torn up around a utility vault or a half-finished planting bed. Both versions of College Square are real right now. Neither one is the finished square.

That gap between "open for football" and "actually done" is the story most people walking through downtown Athens this fall haven't quite pieced together, because Athens-Clarke County's own messaging blurs it. The square across from the University of Georgia's Arch was supposed to be walkable before the first home game on September 5, and it was. What the county's project page still frames as "final completion expected by October" turns out to be a lot more specific once you follow the local reporting from the past several months, and the actual date locals should have circled is six weeks after kickoff, not sometime vaguely inside it.

Two Versions of "Open"

The redesign of College Square, the stretch of College Avenue between East Broad Street and East Clayton Street, broke ground on January 28, 2026, with Sheridan Construction handling the work for Athens-Clarke County and the Athens Downtown Development Authority. The project runs roughly $6.5 to $7 million, funded mostly by the ADDA through financing and parking revenue, with $500,000 coming from TSPLOST 2023 Project #28. The design draws on the walkability of UGA's North Campus, something ADDA planning director David Lynn has described as building "a handshake" between the university and downtown.

From the start, the county set a public deadline that doubled as a marketing hook: substantial completion within eight months, with the plaza open before the Bulldogs' season opener. That happened. What the county's messaging never fully separated is the difference between a space that is passable and a space that is finished. The plaza's official language, that final completion is "expected by October," has stayed vague enough to cover almost any outcome. The actual outcome, once you track it through the spring and summer, landed on a specific Saturday: October 24.

What Almost Broke the Schedule

The clearest sign that "open by football season" and "finished" were never the same promise showed up in April. SPLOST project manager Diana Jackson and ADDA co-director David Lynn told the ADDA board that Georgia Power, despite being notified of the construction timeline months earlier, wanted to pause the project for five weeks to replace equipment inside two underground utility vaults. That pause alone would have pushed the target completion from early September to mid-October, a full six-week slip on a project already built around a hard football deadline.

Jackson said her team was working out an alternate plan with Georgia Power that would add $80,000 to the project's cost but keep the schedule intact.

"The last thing we want to do is put anybody out of business."

That line, reported by Flagpole in April, is worth sitting with. At that point in the spring, sidewalks along College Square remained open but access to individual storefronts was uneven, block by block, depending on which phase of construction sat closest to a given door. The five-week Georgia Power delay never fully materialized on the timeline the county advertised, but it is the reason the real finish line kept sliding past the date most people assumed was the finish line.

What Was Promised, What Actually Happened

Reading the Phase Map

The redesign was always structured in ten phases, and knowing where the project sits in that sequence explains what you're actually looking at on any given walk downtown. Phase 1 rebuilt the center of College Avenue, including sewer, water, and stormwater work below street level. Phases 2 and 3 moved construction closer to the storefronts themselves, tearing out and replacing the walking surfaces nearest business entrances, timed with temporary walkways and some overnight work to keep shops reachable. Phases 4 through 7 worked the corridor in smaller sections, building the new pedestrian areas while keeping parts of the street open at all times. The last stretch, phases 8 through 10, is the part still catching up: shade structures, lighting, and landscaping, the finishing details that turn a rebuilt street into a finished plaza.

By mid-August, local reporting described the project as being in its final phase, with completion approaching in mid-September. That lines up with what a walk through the square shows right now. The paving and core walking surfaces are largely in, which is why the space reads as "open." The shade sails, the new tree plantings, and the final lighting, the phase 8 through 10 work, are the pieces still closing out through this month, ahead of the public celebration planned for late October.

What This Means for a Saturday Downtown

If you're heading downtown for a home game between now and October 24, you are walking through a square that works but isn't wearing its finished look yet. Expect brick paving and most of the seating to be in place. Expect a few corners still fenced or under active work, particularly wherever the final landscaping and shade structures haven't gone in. Storefront access has generally improved since the spring, when the Georgia Power dispute had crews and business owners bracing for a longer disruption, but block-by-block conditions can still shift week to week as the last phases wrap.

None of this makes the square unusable. It has been functioning as downtown's main pedestrian gathering spot since 2020, when the block was first closed to vehicle traffic as a pandemic-era pilot, a closure the Mayor and Commission made permanent the following spring. What's different this fall is that the square is mid-transition between that older, improvised version of itself and the version the county has spent $6.5 to $7 million building.

Why October 24 Is the Date That Actually Matters

The real unveiling is scheduled for Saturday, October 24, and it's built as a full day rather than a single ribbon-cutting photo. The morning starts with an 11 a.m. ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the official reopening. From 1 to 4 p.m., SquareFest takes over the block with family-oriented activities and local partners. The day closes with a free concert at 7 p.m. from BTBTE, a 90s tribute band, turning the new plaza into exactly the kind of gathering space its planners have been describing since the project started, one built for markets, live music, and street festivals rather than just foot traffic between classes and bars.

For longtime residents, the location carries its own layer of memory worth knowing. The stretch of College Avenue now becoming the new plaza once housed Athens' first Varsity restaurant and the newsstand many old-timers remember as Barnett's. The new square isn't erasing that history so much as building the next chapter of it directly on top, a few feet from where UGA students have been crossing to campus for generations.

Between now and then, the smartest way to read College Square is as a plaza in soft opening, not a plaza with anything left to prove. The brick is down. The businesses are open. The party, and the finished version of the space, is still six weeks out.

If you're the kind of Athens resident who likes knowing what's actually happening a block from where you live, not just what the press release says, Madi McPhillips keeps close tabs on the small shifts that change how this town feels day to day. Let's Connect.