Park in the lower lot, cross the bridge, climb the hill behind the restrooms. Fifteen minutes of chaos in the dog park, then a slow loop past the lake where the turtles sun themselves on the log and the ducks beg for whatever the last picnic left behind. If you live in Five Points, you could walk this route with your eyes closed. It feels like it has always been there, like the neighborhood grew up around a piece of ground that was simply always going to be a park.
It hasn't been sitting still. Memorial Park has already been rebuilt once in the last few years, is scheduled to be rebuilt again starting in 2027, and the ground under your feet on that walk is doing more engineering work than most people realize. The version of the park you know right now is a snapshot in the middle of a longer process, not a finished picture.
The Lake Is a Stormwater System With Ducks On It
That lake at the bottom of the hill is not just scenery. As residential development has built up around Five Points over the years, more rainwater runs off more roofs and driveways than the park's original drainage was ever designed to handle. Athens-Clarke County's own engineering assessment described the situation bluntly: the park's stormwater infrastructure needed serious repair to keep functioning, and the erosion problem was bad enough that soil was visibly washing down the slopes into the lake itself.
The fix touched almost everything. County planning documents for the renovation list dredging and enlarging the lake's forebay, increasing the spillway's capacity, repairing the dam, and rebuilding the dam's emergency spillway alongside the more visible dog park upgrade. Part of the project even rerouted sewer lines that carry wastewater from nearby Five Points blocks. The whole thing is financed through Athens-Clarke County's voter-approved Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, the same funding mechanism residents vote on every few years for capital projects across the county.
So the lawn where your dog chases a tennis ball is also load-bearing infrastructure for the neighborhood's drainage. That is not a small detail. It is the reason the park keeps changing shape.
Not Everyone Loved the First Round
The dog park reopened in 2024 with shade structures, new benches, a pet water fountain, better fencing, and accessible concrete paths. It also came with fewer trees than before, removed because grass would not grow underneath them and the bare ground was eroding straight into the lake.
Reaction split along predictable lines. Longtime regular Chris Moore, out with his dog Cooper on a recent afternoon, kept his review simple: "I like the rolling hills. I like the size of it. And the swings." Other visitors online were less settled on the tree removal, missing the shade and the older, wilder feel of the hillside even as they acknowledged the erosion problem was real. Both things can be true. The park needed the fix, and the fix changed something people had grown attached to.
That tension is worth sitting with, because it previews what is coming next.
The Zoo Runs on Its Own Clock
Bear Hollow Zoo sits inside Memorial Park's hardwood forest, home to non-releasable native wildlife: white-tailed deer, an American alligator, North American river otters, great horned owls, and a reptile house. Admission is free, hours run 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, and weather can close it on short notice, as it did during a wind advisory earlier this year.
The zoo's best-known residents have always been its black bears. DJ, estimated to be 22 years old, was euthanized in May 2025 after being diagnosed with spinal osteoarthritis. If you have not walked the trail in a while, the bears you will see now are Athena and Yonah. It is a small, quiet fact, but it is the kind of thing a regular knows and a first-time visitor does not, and it marks the zoo's own timeline running alongside the park's.
What's Actually There Right Now
Worth keeping straight, since the pieces get mixed up:
- Birchmore Trail: a 1.25-mile wooded loop named for Fred Birchmore, the local cyclist who built its granite-boulder centerpiece, the Great Wall of Happy Hollow, by himself in his seventies.
- Lake Walkway Loop: a separate, shorter paved path, three-eighths of a mile around the lake itself.
- Dog park: 1.5 acres on the hillside behind the restrooms, renovated in 2024.
- Bear Hollow Zoo: free, open daily, home to the county's non-releasable native wildlife.
- Athens Creative Theatre's Quinn Hall: also on the property, hosting performances separate from anything happening on the trails.
Four features, one 72-acre park, and most residents only regularly use one or two of them.
The Next Round Starts in 2027
The dog park was not the last item on the county's list. Athens-Clarke County's SPLOST project page for Bear Hollow Zoo improvements calls for a new reptile house with restrooms, quarantine houses, and additional animal enclosures and night houses, aimed at improving both the animals' living conditions and the visitor experience. Construction is scheduled to begin in summer 2027.
That means the zoo you walk through today, calm and mostly unchanged since the dog park work wrapped up, is on the same kind of clock the dog park was on before 2024. The construction will bring the usual disruptions that come with any active build inside a small, forested zoo footprint: closed sections, rerouted paths, maybe a shortened list of animals on exhibit while enclosures get rebuilt. None of that is confirmed in detail yet, because the project has not broken ground. But the funding and the scope are already set, which puts it on a very different footing than a rumor.
The Pattern Underneath the Pattern
Put the pieces together and a shape appears. The lake absorbs runoff from a growing neighborhood. The runoff erodes the hillside. The county fixes the hillside through a public vote and a construction project, and the fix changes something residents had gotten used to. Then the next piece of the park, this time the zoo, comes up for the same treatment.
Five Points did not get handed a finished park and then leave it alone. The park keeps adjusting to how the neighborhood actually uses it, one SPLOST cycle at a time. Your Saturday morning loop, your weekday dog park stop, your kid's first look at an owl up close, all of it sits on top of decisions the county and the community keep revisiting. That is not a flaw in the place. It is a sign the ground under Five Points gets paid attention to, which is more than most neighborhoods can say about the park at their center.
Understanding a neighborhood down to the level of its stormwater system and its construction calendar is the kind of work Ellen McLemore Real Estate does for every corner of Athens it covers, not because it makes for interesting reading, though it often does, but because knowing a place this well is what makes advice about it worth trusting. If you are ever curious what a home near Memorial Park is actually worth, or what smart, targeted improvements could do for a property in this neighborhood before you sell, schedule your free Revival Home consultation and find out.
