Inman Park (proper) was planned in the late 1880s by Joel Hurt, a civil engineer and real-estate developer who intended to create a rural oasis connected to the city by the first of Atlanta's electric streetcar lines, along Edgewood Avenue.

[3][4][5] The Atlanta Constitution in 1896 grandly described Inman Park: High up above the city, where the purest breezes and the brightest sunshine drove away the germs of disease, and where nature had lavished her best gifts, the gentlemen who conceived the thought of Inman Park found the locality above all others which they desired.

[6]Like new developments throughout the United States at the time, but in stark contrast to the attitudes prevalent in the neighborhood today, Inman Park was conceived of and promoted as a segregated community.

The arrival of the automobile allowed upper class Atlantans to live in suburbs farther north from downtown workplaces, such as Morningside and what is now considered Buckhead.

Similar to other intown neighborhoods such as Virginia Highland, Inman Park fell to blight during the white middle and upper class exodus to the northern suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, and was: an economically depressed neighborhood of mostly blue-collar white folks, elderly couples who could not afford to move out and families on disability and welfare.

[7] Driving through the neighborhood on his way to appraise stained glass windows in the doomed home of Judge Durwood T. Pye on Poplar Circle, Robert Griggs was smitten by the extraordinary architecture of the Beath-Dickey House, then a dilapidated multi-unit rental property.

After decades of restoration and renewal, Inman Park is now regarded as a highly desirable intown neighborhood with a mixture of rental and owner-occupied houses and condominiums.

The Festival's centerpiece is the Tour of Homes, which showcases the wide variety of sizes and types of residences in the neighborhood.

In the early 1990s the former Atlanta Stove Works was transformed by swapping out two letters of its name and became the Atlanta Stage Works, a film and media production center that eventually housed the early Tyler Perry film studios and the National AIDS Quilt.

Styles include Queen Anne, high-style Italianate and Romanesque mansion as well as smaller bungalows, shotguns, and foursquares.