The annual Inman Park Festival and Tour of Homes started in 1972 as a way to attract attention to the gentrification efforts that sought to revitalize the area. Over the previous decades, Inman Park had fallen victim to neglect and disrepair and then to redlining. That’s when a small group of Inman Park homeowners came together to plan the first festival. Their goal was simple – to raise awareness of efforts to save and restore the historic homes that make up the heart of the neighborhood. Over the years, Inman Park Festival has evolved from a single afternoon with 3,000 guests to a three-day festival that attracts over 45,000 people.

The Inman Park Festival takes months of planning, over 700 volunteers, and thousands of hours of hard work. It is completely run by volunteers, making it one of the largest volunteer-run festivals in the Southeast. Proceeds from the festival fund projects like historic preservation, sidewalk restoration, neighborhood beautification, education, and other projects that benefit Inman Park and the surrounding communities.

Each year, the days and weeks leading up to the festival are full of anticipation as signs of preparation appear around the neighborhood. Temporary power poles go up, and American flags are installed along the streets. There are volunteer events to clean up the neighborhood parks, and people tidy their own yards and plant flowers. The City of Atlanta street sweepers come through the day before, and the whole neighborhood is gussied up and ready for a party. In anticipation of the festival, here is what happens in the neighborhood.

About 6 weeks before the event, the temporary power poles are installed. These are used by the music stages and some of the food vendors. 

Signs go up advertising the festival and asking for volunteers to sign up.

Tickets for the Tour of Homes go on sale. Inman Park residents get a discount.

Two weeks before the event, the flags show up. I saw these flags around the neighborhood this week. Now I know we’re getting close to Festival!

During the week before the festival, we start to see No Parking signs and street barricades delivered. During the event, several neighborhood streets are blocked off to create a pedestrian zone. The streets are lined with booths for the arts and crafts fair and the street market, and there is no room for cars. If you live on one of these streets, you have to either put your car in your driveway and leave it there all weekend or move your car to another part of the neighborhood if you plan on driving somewhere during the weekend.

A couple of days before Festival, the golf carts are delivered. Since the area becomes a car-free zone during the festival, golf carts are used by the staff and volunteers to deliver ice, to take away trash, and to run other errands.

Port-o-potties are also delivered, because, well you know…

On the Friday of Festival weekend, the music tents go up, stages for the musicians are erected, and chairs for the audience are set up. Bike racks are arranged at the bike valet stations for guests who arrive on bicycle.

At 6 am on Saturday morning, the vendors start to arrive and set up their booths.

By 11 am when the festival begins and people start streaming into the neighborhood, I am positively vibrating with excitement about the weekend ahead…

The Freedom Farmers Market is a year-round market held in the parking lot of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center. The Carter Center is in our neighborhood, a 25-minute walk or a short drive away, and we generally go every Saturday morning. We go at 8:30 am because it can get really crowded, especially in the spring and summer when the weather is nice and the produce is abundant.

It’s a large market with a wide variety of vendors – fruit and vegetables, mushrooms, bread and pastries, shrimp, beef, chicken, eggs, and cheese as well as a couple of breakfast stalls and booths selling packaged goods like jams, kimchi, honey, and cured meats. In our early days in the neighborhood, the market was smaller during the winter, but now there are plenty of vendors during the colder months to make the weekly trip worthwhile.

The food costs more than the offerings at the grocery store, but we’re okay with that. It’s all organic and, because it’s local and in season and just picked, it tastes so much better. Plus, we like to support small, local farms and businesses. We visit the farmers market on Saturday morning, and based on what we buy, we then plan our meals and grocery shopping for the upcoming week. We eat what’s in season, and the result is a varied menu throughout the year. 

We’re fortunate to have such a great resource within walking distance of our house. In addition to providing healthy food choices, it’s a fun part of our weekly routine and it offers creative culinary inspiration throughout the year.

When we moved into our house, our front yard was mostly pine straw and our side yard was all turf grass. Over the years, Chad has spent a lot of time and effort turning our yard into a beautiful garden where it’s a pleasant place to spend time when the weather is nice. The thoughtful selection of plants ensures that there is always something green or flowering or both throughout the year. As you might guess, springtime is my favorite season, and there is a lot happening in the garden right now.

Finally, the oak-leaf hydrangea is just sending out buds, and I can’t wait for these to bloom over the next couple of weeks.

Happy Spring!

Another round of flowers are blooming.

Azaleas are in full bloom, and it seems  like they’re everywhere.

Trees are also blooming and filling out.

Of course, along with all of this growth comes the pollen which is terrible in Georgia. There is green powder on everything. Even though I’m not allergic to anything, all of the particulate matter in the air bothers my eyes and makes me cough. It’s pretty bad.

Finally, I saw the sunlight coming through these stained-glass windows on Palm Sunday morning, and it reminded me again of all of the colors that show up during springtime.

The Atlanta Botanical Garden is having its annual Spring Blooms event. At the end of winter, gardeners plant spring bulbs around the property, and, over the course of the spring, thousands of flowers appear. 

The primary focus is on tulips, and this year, 200,000 tulip bulbs were planted. Tulips come in a wide range of colors, shapes and sizes, and there are many varieties growing in the garden right now. Colors range from whites and yellows to pinks and reds to deep purples. Some flowers are a single solid color, and some are striped. Some tulips have just a few petals, and some have a cluster of two or three dozen. Some petals have smooth edges, and some are frilly.

The garden staff does a great job of creating a variety of color palettes throughout the garden. Tulips are mixed with daffodils, hyacinths, jonquils and other flowers to provide a multi-colored tapestry with a variety of heights, shapes, and textures. Overall, the Spring Blooms event is always impressive.

Another springtime garden event is Orchid Daze. The garden has a premier orchid collection as well as programs focused on orchid research and conservation around the world. While the Orchid Daze lasts for a few weeks in the spring and features some special events like Vanilla Sunday (natural vanilla comes from the cured seed pod of the Vanilla planifolia orchid plant), the Orchid Display House is open year-round and focuses on orchids that grow in tropical regions from sea level to 4,000 feet elevation. 

Just like tulips, orchids come in all kinds of shapes, colors, and sizes. Some grow harmlessly on other plants, some grow on rocks, and some grow in soil. It’s always fun to wander through the orchid house and take in the variety of plants.

Stay tuned for another post later this year where I’ll dive into more about the features of the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

There are some interesting transportation options in Atlanta these days. 

There’s always the Marta train which is helpful for getting to certain locations around the city. The train system was built in 1979 with a north-south axis and an east-west axis. If you want to go somewhere on an axis, it’s helpful. If you want to go somewhere between the axis legs, it’s rubbish. Luckily for me, we live within walking distance of a Marta train station (we did that on purpose) and I work within walking distance of a train station. This makes it easy for me to take the train to work if it’s raining or if I’m just feeling lazy and don’t want to walk to work.

Uber and Lyft are convenient options if you want a more direct trip. Uber arrived in Atlanta in 2014 and was, by and far, a much better option than the local taxi service. Uber was great in the beginning, but I found that the service degraded over time as I started getting dirty, run-down cars when the gig economy took off. Lyft is generally better and cheaper (but does anyone else remember the giant pink moustaches from the early Lyft days?).

Atlanta used to have Zipcar and City Carshare. I used this service a lot. For example, I would take Marta to work and then use Zipcar to go to a doctor appointment in the middle of the day. I think Uber killed this.

For a while there was a bike-share program. Bikes were located around the city and you could use an app to check one out. And then scooters came along.

The scooter craze hit Atlanta in 2018 when thousands of these things were dropped around the city. This was a big mess with scooters all over the place, blocking sidewalks. It was as if cicada carcasses had fallen out of the sky all over the city. Scooters reigned supreme, and people were riding them EVERYWHERE, until Covid.

Flash forward to today.

Scooters are still around. I don’t see people using them as much, but they are still used. The scooter companies now have bikes.

But here’s the best part. Atlanta now has delivery robots and driverless cars.

The delivery robots are from Serve Robotics and are used for food delivery through Uber Eats and Doordash. I see them all over the place in downtown Atlanta because Georgia State University has its main campus buildings here, and there are tons of restaurants that do take-out for students. I also see these cute bots closer to my house in Old Fourth Ward along the beltline.

Every robot travels on sidewalks, waits patiently at red lights, uses the crosswalks, and pauses to let humans pass by. Each robot also has a unique name, which makes these little guys seem like adorable pets.

Driverless cars also arrived in Atlanta last year. These cars are by Waymo, and every one is a white Jaguar sedan with loads of navigation cameras. They are available through Uber, which might be the smartest thing Uber has done in a long time. The cars are much safer than human-driven cars, because they obey all traffic rules, they don’t drink and drive, they don’t text, they pay attention to pedestrians crossing the street, etc. After some of my experiences with Uber drivers, I would totally take a Waymo instead of a human driver.

Despite a cold snap earlier this week, it’s finally springtime in Atlanta. This is my favorite time of year. The days grow longer, and the weather warms up. Trees are pushing out new leaves and spring flowers are blooming, adding splashes of color everywhere after the dullness of the winter. For my walking commute to work, I no longer need to wear my winter layers of clothes in the morning, but it’s not yet the height of summer weather that leaves me overheated and dripping with sweat as I walk home in the afternoon. 

The birds are waking up earlier, sometimes a little too early, tweeting at 4:30 am. We’re seeing lots of fat robins flitting from tree to tree and hopping around the yard. Each spring, we typically get a nest somewhere in the yard with three or four eggs. Our little pond provides a resource for all kinds of birds throughout the year, and we’re continuing to see activity as birds take advantage of this water feature to have a drink of water or take a bath.

There are tons of flowers blooming around our neighborhood with a variety of colors and sizes.

There are also lots of flowering trees right now. Common trees are dogwoods, redbuds, and cherry trees.

Spring marks the beginning of festival season in Atlanta. Beginning in spring and running through the fall, there are a variety of festivals in neighborhoods and parks all over the city. One of my plans this year is to go to all of the major festivals. Some of them will be old favorites like the Inman Park Festival in our own neighborhood, and some of them will be new experiences.

Spring also signals the end of the school year, and even though we don’t have kids, I still feel the change in the rhythm of the calendar. At the end of May, we’ll stop hearing the school bus picking up kids in front of our house at 6:57 am and dropping them off at 2:35 pm during the week. My church handbell choir will pause rehearsals for three months which will free up my Wednesday evenings. The neighborhood pool behind our house will open up for the summer, giving Chad and me a place to cool off and relax together after a long day of work. And just in general, there’s a mental shift as we look forward to a change of pace – that sense of free time and long days of summer.

Ponce City Market is a mixed-use development next to the Beltline in the center of Atlanta. The Beltline is a 22-mile hike and bike path that circles Atlanta, and its construction over the last several years has led to an explosion in real estate development along its perimeter, including the development of Ponce City Market.

The original brick building of Ponce City Market was built in 1926 to be the southeast headquarters for Sears Roebuck and Company, and it was occupied by the company until 1987. At the time, it was the largest brick building east of the Mississippi River. It housed company offices, a retail store, and the catalog warehouse.

From 1990-2010, the City of Atlanta housed part of its city hall function here. When we moved to Atlanta in 2009, people talked about City Hall East, referring to this building. The City sold the building to Jamestown, a developer, in 2011. In about 2012, Jamestown began construction to turn the building into a mixed-use development with restaurants, retail, office space, and apartments, and the redevelopment opened in 2014.

Chad and I were able to take a tour during construction, and we learned some interesting facts. One of the most interesting things is that, for the offices and apartments, you are able to drive your car up to your floor and park next to your office/apartment. During the Jamestown renovation of the property, the structural engineer didn’t have to fortify the upper floors to support the weight of the cars that would park there, because the floors were already designed to warehouse Sears catalogues. Can you imagine? As an architect, that little fact has stuck with me for 14 years, even though I haven’t seen it published anywhere.

The adaptive reuse of the building from a warehouse-type of place to a modern mixed-use is pretty interesting. The ground floor and second floor contain a wonderful food hall and retail tenants. The upper eight or so floors are offices and apartments.

The fun murals and graphic design elements are carried throughout the development and used for signage as well as general decoration.

One of the old freight elevators is still functioning, and it carries people up to the roof deck. The roof deck is open to the public, and it has an amusement park, a bar, and a great restaurant.

In addition to having this development as an amenity in central Atlanta (I can walk to it, by the way), I have also contributed to the design of Ponce City Market. Gensler designed the Jamestown office in the building, and I was the sustainability lead for that project ensuring that the best materials, energy efficiency, and human health aspects were included in the design through LEED.

During my time at Integral Engineering, I was the project manager and sustainability lead for the next three buildings on the property – an apartment building, a hotel, and a retail/office building, all of which are LEED certified. 

The high-rise apartment building called Signal House is right on the Beltline. The apartments are pretty pricey – $2,400 for a one-bedroom, $3,100-$3700 for a 2-bedroom, and $4,300 for a 3-bedroom. However, the building is in a prime location, and amenities include a pool on an upper deck, a rooftop community garden, fitness room, clubhouse lounge, and concierge services.

The Scout hotel is interesting. It has regular hotel rooms, but it also has extended stay mini-apartments. It was quite the challenge to design these little apartments to feel luxurious while using minimal square footage. Like Signal House, the building has a rooftop pool and concierge service in addition to the regular hotel housekeeping services. The ground floor has retail spaces that can be leased and built out to be shops and/or restaurants.

The third building that I worked on, and probably the most interesting one, is the retail/office building. Pottery Barn has moved into the ground floor retail space, and there is office space for lease on the floors above. 

The building is all wood structure (columns, beams, floors) which is common in Europe but is highly unusual in the United States. Wood construction has a much lower carbon footprint than steel and concrete, and one of the primary goals of the overall development is to reduce its carbon footprint.

Other design decisions to reduce carbon footprint across the development includes not having gas service on the site. This means that all of the apartment kitchens plus the future restaurant kitchens will be all-electric; there will not be gas stoves or gas water heaters. This is a fairly novel idea, especially for Georgia, and it was great to be part of the team that designed these cutting edge projects.

This weekend was the biennial Flower Show at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Since this year is the 50th anniversary of the garden, the theme of the flower show was Heirlooms, and the show featured exceptional creations.  We had been to the show in 2024, so it was fun to go again and see the new creations on exhibit.

The show was divided into four primary types of art – Floral Design, Horticulture, Photography and Botanical Arts. Within each of these divisions were judged competitions, and the awards for First Place, Second Place, and Honorable Mention were displayed next to the entries.

The Floral Design division was probably the most interesting one. Each entry used flowers to create a work of art. The division was divided into six categories – Vintage Illustrations, Chapeaux de l’Epoque, Portraitures, Art on the Grounds, Keepsake China, and Time-Honored Anniversary Gifts.

The Chapeaux de l’Epoque category featured hat styles from different decades.

The Portraitures category featured bouquets that were inspired by portraits of women who made important contributions to the botanical garden over the years. Dorothy Chapman Fuqua and her husband donated the money to build the greenhouse conservatory on the property and provided the foundation for the garden’s orchid center.

Margaret Sheffield Martin was an influential member of the garden’s Board of Directors in the 1980s.

The Art on the Grounds category showcased floral pieces inspired by art objects located around the garden.

The category of Keepsake China showed designs interpreting china or pottery. Each of the entries was displayed in a box.

In the category of Time-Honored Anniversary Gifts, this one represented Silver:

The Horticulture division showcased plants that had been cultivated by home gardeners, and they were divided into two categories – Cut Specimens and Container-Grown Plants. Each subcategory was further divided into a series of classes such as annuals and biennials, perennials, flowering containers, foliage containers. There were a total of 41 classes across the two categories.

Some of the cut flower entries:

One subcategory was Cut Collection in an Heirloom Container:

There was a category called Collection of Three Flowering Geophytes:

The entries weren’t limited to flowers.

The Photography division had some interesting photographs on display. Flowers weren’t required to be included in every entry; it depended on the category in which the photo was entered – Estate Sale, Heirloom Stories, Beauty Never Fades, Whispers of the Past, A Moment in Time, Tools of the Trade, Jubilee, and Moving Forward by Reinterpreting the Past.

Each entry in the Estate Sale category was a composed still life, plant material not required but suggested.

Heirloom Stories featured close-up photographs of heirloom plants.

Whispers of the Past show images of a single bloom in an antique vessel.

A Moment in Time included images of a statue or monument from years past.

Tools of the Trade – photos of garden tools.

Jubilee depicted images of celebration.

Moving Forward by Reinterpreting the Past was very interesting. Each photographer had to take a photo of a bird and then use post-editing techniques to mimic an Audubon print.

The final division was Botanical Arts. In this group, artists created objects with dried flowers, leaves, and seeds in the categories of A Lady’s Ring, A Gentleman’s Pocket Watch, A Child’s Keepsake Box, A Christening Bonnet, A Jack in the Box, and A Cherished Heirloom Seed. I didn’t get any photos of these entries because, quite frankly, I didn’t find them very compelling.

As you can see, with the exception of the Horticulture division, each division had themes of the past, memories, time. The show and its exhibits were a great way to pay tribute to the 50-year history of the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

Today is John Lewis’ birthday. He was born in Pike County, Alabama on February 21, 1940. When he was growing up, his mom told him to stay out of trouble. He took that to heart, and throughout his life, he only got into what he called “good trouble.”

Mr. Lewis was a civil rights activist and one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. He started his activist career while he was a college student in Nashville. His first arrest (of nearly 50 during his life) was at the Woolworths where he and other black students were peacefully waiting to be served at the lunch counter on the mezzanine. During a trip to Nashville in 2018, I visited the old Woolworths. It is now a large restaurant, and I had lunch at the ground-floor lunch counter. I sat right there on the fourth stool and had sweet potato soup.

Mr. Lewis later became close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1963, He joined Rev. Dr. King for the March on Washington where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. A 23-year-old John Lewis also delivered a speech to the crowd of 200,000.

In 1965, he was one of the participants in a march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama to protest racial discrimination in voting. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the marchers were met with violence by local law enforcement. The police beat Mr. Lewis so badly that they cracked his skull.

In 1961, he became one of the original thirteen Freedom Riders. The group of blacks and whites planned to ride interstate buses from Washington, DC to New Orleans and to challenge laws in the South which mandated segregated seating on buses. In the South, the group was beaten by angry mobs and arrested.

Later, Mr. Lewis formally entered the political world. He was the US Representative for Georgia’s 5th District from 1987 until his death in 2020. Among his other accomplishments, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

My neighborhood is in the 5th district, so he was my congressman. During the Inman Park Festival each spring, he would ride in the parade, and his car would be staged next to my house before the event. It was fun to watch people walk up to him and shake his hand as he waited for the parade to start. For all of his fame and accomplishments, he was very down to earth. He was absolutely adored around here. 

Mr. Lewis died July 17, 2020, just four months into the pandemic. He didn’t get to see us emerge on the other side of that terrible time. He didn’t get to see Joe Biden get elected as US president in November 2020. 

When he died, the neighbors put ribbons all over the neighborhood. Some of them were up for months.

As I reflect back on John Lewis’ story, I recognize that he was a humble man who led a remarkable life. And, up until the end, he was getting into good trouble.