Wandering the Streets of Inman Park

Crooked Sidewalks and Sweet Tea: A Walk Through Inman Park

Inman Park announced itself to me through its trees - massive live oaks lining Euclid Avenue, their branches so heavy with Spanish moss and ambition that they formed a tunnel of green above the sidewalk. I stepped off the MARTA at Inman Park station and let my feet decide the route, which is the only honest way to meet this neighborhood.

Atlanta's first planned suburb, laid out in 1889, wears its age with the confidence of someone who knows they look good. The Victorian mansions along Edgewood Avenue are enormous and unapologetic, all turrets and wraparound porches and paint colors that suggest the original owners had strong feelings about aesthetics. One house - I swear - was painted three shades of teal. It worked.

I turned onto Hurt Street and found myself in front of the Trolley Barn, the old streetcar depot that now hosts everything from weddings to art shows. The brick walls still carry the faint industrial perfume of axle grease and iron, even after a century of gentrification.

Breakfast called, and I answered at Barcelona Wine Bar on North Highland Avenue. Their shakshuka arrived in a cast-iron skillet hot enough to brand cattle, the eggs trembling in a lake of spiced tomato. I ate slowly, watching the morning parade outside - joggers, dog walkers, a man carrying a French horn case like it owed him money.

The BeltLine's Eastside Trail cuts through the neighborhood like a concrete river, and I joined the current heading south. Murals erupted on every available surface - a thirty-foot monarch butterfly, an abstract explosion of indigo and gold, a portrait of John Lewis that made me stop and stand still for a full minute.

I doubled back to Euclid Avenue and ducked into The Albert, a bar tucked into a building that has been, at various points, a grocery store, a hair salon, and reportedly a speakeasy. The cocktail menu changes seasonally, but the atmosphere is permanent: low light, exposed brick, the murmur of people who are exactly where they want to be.

By midafternoon I was sitting in Springvale Park, the little green triangle where Euclid and Edgewood meet, eating a popsicle from King of Pops and watching a squirrel wage war on a bird feeder. Inman Park felt, in that moment, like a neighborhood that had figured something out - how to be old and new simultaneously, how to honor its bones while growing new skin. I finished the popsicle. The squirrel won.