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.

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Inman Park Activism

Inman Park and other intown neighbors joined forces in the 1970's to fight an expressway that would have destroyed historic intown neighborhoods. A four-lane expressway with 5 bridges over neighborhood streets was planned for construction by the Georgia DOT, through the 219 acres we now know as Freedom Park. The Expressway was supported by former US President Jimmy Carter, Atlanta Mayor Andy Young, a majority of the Atlanta City Council and DeKalb County CEO Manuel Maloof. In the face of such formidable opposition the neighborhoods sustained years of legal action in courts all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court.  It was a 20-year battle waged by resident volunteers. Rep. John Lewis was on the Atlanta City Council at this time and he and many others including Mayor Maynard Jackson joined in the fight with neighbors. 

C.A.U.T.I.O.N., Citizens Against Unnecessary Throughways in Older Neighborhoods, was formed as well as Roadbusters to stop the road. Together they waged legal battles, lobbied state and federal lawmakers, protested and elected 67 anti-road politicians to local, state and federal office. A few years ago, Rep. John Lewis attended the 25th anniversary of Stop the Road. His words ring true today "the struggle is never over".  

Rep. John Lewis talking about good trouble and the Inman Park Road Fighters