ATLANTA — ONE Musicfest is coming to Piedmont Park this year with a star lineup.
"It's the prime space to be in Atlanta if you're doing a large-scale festival," founder J. Carter said.
He's always dreamed of moving the event to Piedmont Park and this year it's a reality.
"We're doubling in size," he said. "Piedmont Park is massive. In order to make sure that we fill the space, obviously we had to go a little heavy on the artists as well."
Janet Jackson and Kendrick Lamar are headlining this weekend's festival. In total, Carter said they're expecting about 45,000 people a day.
That's about twice as many tickets as they sold last year at Central Park, where they had to limit capacity.
"It's an amazing cultural good time good feel event," he said. "It's an incredible weekend of live music, festival activities, amazing food. That's something we curate almost as stringently as our artist lineup is our food lineup."
Carter expects to employ more than 4,000 people between setup, cleanup, security, hospitality and more.
Adrian Foreman said he's attended the festival almost every year for the last decade. He's excited to see it move to such a large venue.
"It's fun. It's Atlanta. You get to have a good time. You see a lot of you see a lot of cool people," he said. "I think it's been awesome showing how somebody planted a seed and did something nobody else did and it made it a big event, a must-attend event."
"It's an incredible event to experience and be a part of," Carter said. "The giveback and what we do for the city as well is just as important."
Not everyone is thrilled about another large-scale event at Piedmont Park. Andrew O. still notices damage from Music Midtown when he walks through Piedmont Park.
"You have to rearrange your life for basically a whole weekend and then some because the park is not usable and then you have to sit in traffic," he said. "A lot of other parts are just not back to what they were originally and now we're going to have 50,000 people here again."
Herman Faesi told 11Alive he was walking to dinner because the traffic was so bad. He's worried Piedmont Park won't be able to recover from so many large-scale events.
"It's impossible to drive anywhere... traffic is crazy, there's people everywhere," he said. "The most important thing is that they're going to destroy that park having these kind of events over and over again. It's good to have stuff going on in the park, but not like this, not that much."
Carter said repairs and beautification is something ONE Musicfest planned for.
"That was in a budget sheet as we went into planning," he said. "We definitely plan to beautify the park, make it look a little bit better than we received it."
Organizers said parking will be limited, so they encourage attendees to take rideshare or MARTA. The park is within walking distance from the Midtown station.
11Alive also asked if there will be any new safety measures at the festival after this week's mass shooting in Maine. Event organizers said they've never had any incidents of violence at the festival, and normal safety protocols will be in place.
Organizers encourage people looking for ticket resales to go through Lyte, its fan-to-fan ticket exchange.
Because of the festival, 10th Street NE between Monroe Drive and Piedmont Avenue will be closed from Friday, October 27 at 11 p.m. until Monday, October 30 at 6 a.m. Other lane closures and parking restrictions are listed on the community impact site here.