Our Beginnings
Inman Park is Atlanta’s first planned residential suburb and also Atlanta’s first electric trolley neighborhood. Created at the cusp of the twentieth century, this ideal Victorian neighborhood — curved streets, generous residential lots and verdant parks — was built upon the wrecked land of Atlanta’s Civil War battlefield, two miles east of Downtown Atlanta.
Inman Park was the brainchild of a renaissance thinker named Joel Hurt (1850-1926), who modeled the neighborhood after other trolley neighborhoods he had seen throughout the United States. In particular, Hurt, who now has Hurt Street named after him, had been impressed with the park-like neighborhoods created by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and along with landscape architect James Forsyth Johnson, plotted Inman Park in the late 1880s.