For this year’s Inman Park Festival, I had planned out our whole weekend to tour some homes, listen to great music, and eat lots of festival food. Instead, this happened.

I didn’t get to see much of the festival at all due to a broken arm.

I anticipated being very busy during Festival weekend because there were so many things I wanted to see and do. In anticipation, I had drafted a blog post beforehand. Even though we didn’t get to see much of the festival, I wanted to be sure to capture the event, and I have lots of photos from previous years that give an idea of what the weekend is like.

The Arts and Crafts Market and The Street Market

There are something like 400 vendors who participate in the festival. Several streets become pedestrian-only, and a crowd of people come into the neighborhood. Sometimes the streets feel like they’re crowded shoulder-to-shoulder with people.

Food and Drink

The Inman Park Festival has a plethora of food vendors that offer festival staples such as hand pies, barbecue, gyros, sausages, sandwiches, and other street food. I always get excited about the fact that there is a corndog stand a block away from my house for two whole days, and I did manage to get a jalapeno corndog. Last year I discovered a food truck that does great crepes, so I made a point of going there again, but they were sold out. There are also plenty of beer trucks and wine and cocktail vendors if you’re thirsty. I mostly stuck around the house and tried to rest. There’s always next year!

Music

There are three music stages set up around the neighborhood, and groups perform from noon until 7 or 8 pm each day. There is always a wide variety of music including, rock, jazz, blues, Cajun, folk, indie, soul, R&B, Latin, bluegrass, funk, Americana, and so much more. This year, there were 29 musical groups, and we managed to see none of them.

Dance Festival

This year was the 25th anniversary of the Inman Park Dance Festival with a free performance on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in the Trolley Barn. Six dance organizations participated, and performances included classical ballet blended with African dance forms, Honors Program students from Emory University’s Dance & Movement Studies Program, a solo performance, a modern dance company with artists with and without apparent and non-apparent disabilities, an athletic dance company, and an Inman Park dance school for ages 3 through adult.

Little Gnome Zone

During Festival each year, the Little Gnome Zone is set up in Springvale Park. This kids’ zone is especially designed to help get the wiggles out of the youngest Inman Park Festival goers. In addition to the permanent playground in the park, there’s a bounce house, arts and crafts activities, face painting, circus and aerial acts, and a variety of drinks and snacks for sale. This year, there was also a K-pop dance party with a DJ on Saturday afternoon.

Tour of Homes

Inman Park was founded in 1889 as Atlanta’s first planned suburb, an elegant neighborhood with its own privately operated street car system. Over time, however, the area fell into decline, and by the early 1970s it had become a neglected, redlined neighborhood facing serious challenges. Recognizing the enduring charm and potential of its historic houses, a small group of determined buyers stepped in. They worked to convince lenders and insurance providers that Inman Park was once again a worthy place for investment. In 1972, these trailblazing residents opened their recently acquired homes to the public to highlight their restoration work, giving rise to what is now the Inman Park Tour of Homes.

The Parade

The annual parade takes place on Saturday afternoon. Billed as the quirkiest and most colorful parade in Atlanta, it includes marching bands, floats, art cars, drill teams, mascots, clowns, jugglers, politicians, and much, much more. We did manage to see the parade this year as we returned home from urgent care just 15 minutes before the parade started.

The parade starts in front of our house which adds to the excitement every year. A couple of hours before the start time, parade participants begin showing up on our corner. We can hear bagpipes and marching bands practicing, we see people in colorful costumes milling around, and local and state politicians arrive with their chauffeurs and convertibles. One of my favorite parts of the weekend is watching the head parade marshal (not to be confused with the Grand Marshal) with her bullhorn as she organizes the groups and shouts at them each in turn to start marching down the parade route.

The parade is always led by a Grand Marshal who is chauffeured in a fancy car.

There are always politicians and political messages from various groups.

Some of the parade groups were what you’d expect from a traditional parade.

Other participants are more on the fun-loving, silly side.

The Gnome Tradition

When we first moved here, there was a group of people marching in the parade dressed as garden gnomes. They were trying to break a Guiness record for the largest gathering of people dressed as gnomes. There was already an established record in England with 478 people. The Atlanta group marched in the parade for several years before finally breaking the record with 755 people in 2018. Since then, gnomes continue to participate in Inman Park Festival albeit in much smaller numbers. And you can find tiny gnome hats in the neighborhood throughout the year.

While the main festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday, there are activities on Friday as well. The Tour of Homes starts on Friday afternoon and runs through the weekend. This year I did a volunteer shift for one of the homes and checked people’s tickets. It was so much fun. I met a lot of people (the tour was really busy  on Friday), and I got to see familiar faces from the neighborhood. You buy your ticket ahead of time, and then each house is a self-guided tour. Can you imagine being a home-owner and having hundreds of people traipsing through your house over three days? No, thank you. There were no photos allowed in the house where I volunteered which is the owner’s prerogative, but here’s the facade.

One of the houses was very interesting due to the fact that it was in the middle of a renovation. And the owners were living through it all with their infant son and very large dog. They thought they were just going to scrape and repaint the walls, but they uncovered structural damage and failing plaster in the process. I’m guessing this is what it was like for neighborhood “pioneers” in the 1970s who were buying decrepit old houses and fixing them up while living in them.

Another interesting house was built by neighborhood friends in 2002. The husband is an architect and a big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. You can see Wright’s influence in the design. It’s funny, Chad and I had been there for dinner and Chad had attended many festival committee planning meetings in the house, but we had never gotten a full tour.

The other event on Friday evening is the Butterfly Ball. The event is an annual fundraiser for neighborhood theater groups. We did go this year but we’ve gone previously, and it’s a fun evening with dinner, a band, and dancing. I took some photos while the catering crew and music stage guys were setting up earlier in the afternoon. As you can see in the photos, this year’s theme was Alice in Wonderland.

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 Thursday before festival, the local preschool organizes hay rides for the kids, and a couple of older neighbors drive groups around the neighborhood. What I can’t figure out is where these guys store the tractors during the rest of the year. It’s not like we have farms and barns around here.

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. Directional signposts are also staged around the neighborhood. The food vendors set up their tents and park their food trucks.

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.