The Sandy Springs Fall Festival Everyone Still Calls by Its Old Name
Ask a longtime Sandy Springs resident what happens at City Springs every September and you'll likely hear about the craft booths, the kids running through the splash pad, maybe a cover band on a small stage near the library. That's not wrong, exactly. It's just describing a festival that doesn't exist anymore.
The event booked for City Green, Blue Stone Road, and the surrounding blocks on September 25 and 26, 2026, has a national touring headliner on each night, a Georgia premiere from an internationally known performance company, and a dog-friendly 5K that doubles as an official qualifier for the Peachtree Road Race. If your mental picture is still the old neighborhood craft fair, you're going to misjudge parking, timing, and what to wear.
The festival most residents still call by muscle memory used to run under a different name entirely. What's happening this September is the fourth year the city has produced it as the Blue Stone Arts & Music Festival, having retired the longtime Heritage Sandy Springs Festival branding in favor of something built for a bigger stage. The location tells part of the story on its own. This isn't tucked into a single park lawn. It spans City Green, spills onto Blue Stone Road itself, and takes over the surrounding City Springs district for two full days.
The city is producing it directly, with backing from the Fulton County Board of Commissioners and a corporate sponsor in Nissan of Marietta. That's a different funding and logistics model than a grassroots craft show, and it shows up in the size of what's actually booked.
Friday night's headliner is Nicotine Dolls, the New York City alt-rock band making what organizers describe as their final United States performance before departing on an international tour. Saturday belongs to Allen Stone, the Grammy-nominated soul and R&B singer currently touring alongside Chris Stapleton and slated to join Teddy Swims for dates later this fall, all while finishing a new album. Both nights include a run of opening acts, among them tribute bands built around Zach Bryan and Bon Jovi.
Running in parallel both days is the Georgia premiere of Joy Machine from Squonk, an outdoor performance piece built around live music, visual spectacle, and audience participation rather than a traditional concert format.
Here's the fuller picture of what's on the ground:
None of that reads like a neighborhood craft fair. It reads like a regional festival that happens to be five minutes from your driveway.
Here's where the calendar gets genuinely confusing if you're not paying attention. Two weeks before Blue Stone takes over City Springs, a completely different event runs under a similarly generic name: the Sandy Springs Artsapalooza Fall Arts and Craft Festival, scheduled for September 12 and 13, 2026.
This one isn't at City Springs at all. It's held at the Century Springs Office Complex on Lake Forrest Drive, near the Interstate 285 and Roswell Road exit, and it's organized by a nonprofit arts group rather than the city government. The scale and feel are entirely different too, capped at up to 125 arts and crafts vendors with a children's play area, local musicians, and interactive art stations. It's the kind of event where you browse handmade pottery and jewelry booths on a Saturday morning, not the kind where you're checking a concert set time.
| Sandy Springs Artsapalooza | Blue Stone Arts & Music Festival | |
|---|---|---|
| Dates | Sept 12-13, 2026 | Sept 25-26, 2026 |
| Location | Lake Forrest Dr NW, near I-285/Roswell Rd | City Green, Blue Stone Rd, City Springs |
| Scale | Up to 125 arts and crafts vendors | 60+ artist market vendors, two concert stages |
| Organizer | Nonprofit arts association | City of Sandy Springs |
| Headline draw | Handmade goods, family activities | National touring music acts, Squonk's Joy Machine |
If someone tells you they're going to "the fall festival" this September, you now have a reason to ask which one.
Even outside those two big weekends, City Springs keeps a running calendar that plenty of residents treat as background noise rather than something worth planning around. The Sandy Springs Farmers Market sets up around the City Green every Saturday morning from 8:30 to noon, rain or shine, with more than twenty vendors selling produce and artisan foods each week through November. It's an easy anchor for a Saturday that doesn't require driving anywhere.
Friday nights bring free outdoor movies to City Green as well, and this year the city opened the October 9 pick to a public vote for a spooky-themed film, a small but telling sign of how much the programming here now leans on resident input rather than a fixed civic calendar handed down from above.
Festival weekends tend to reroute dinner plans, and Sandy Springs has had some real movement on that front this year. Rumi's Kitchen's Sandy Springs flagship reopened in March 2026 after a renovation that started at a budgeted $3.5 million and nearly tripled by the time the doors reopened. The redesigned space, done by Johnson Studio in a Persian-inspired style, includes a 22-seat curved marble bar and a private dining room anchored by a floor-to-ceiling mural from artist Dean Barger. The kitchen also brought on pastry chef Sohrob Esmaili, a 2021 Food Network Spring Baking Championship winner, to build out a dessert program that wasn't part of the original restaurant's identity.
On the casual end, Moxie Burger, the local chain with five existing locations, has confirmed a new spot is on the way to Chastain Market at 4600 Roswell Road. It's a smaller story than a $3.5 million reopening, but it's another sign that the restaurant scene around Sandy Springs keeps adding rather than standing still.
None of this changes anything about your home or your neighbors. What it changes is what a September Saturday in Sandy Springs can look like, and how easy it is to get the details wrong if you're relying on what the festival used to be rather than what it is now. A neighborhood that quietly upgrades its own civic calendar, adding a Grammy-nominated headliner, a Georgia premiere performance piece, and a $3.5 million restaurant renovation in the same year, is worth paying attention to even if you have no plans to move.
If you're a Sandy Springs homeowner who's curious what a fall like this does to your home's value, or you just want to talk shop about where the neighborhood is headed next, Julia & Associates is happy to walk through it with you, festival tickets not required. And if the timing ever turns from curiosity into something more concrete, a free home valuation is always on the table.
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