Best Atlanta Neighborhood 2024, Elite Eight: Inman Park vs. Cabbagetown

Josh Green

Tue, 12/24/2024 – 12:42

As part of ongoing Best of Atlanta 2024 coverage, Urbanize’s fourth-annual Best Atlanta Neighborhood tournament kicked off last week with 16 places vying for the prestige of being called the city’s greatest.

Now, for this Elite Eight contest, voting will be open until 3 p.m. Thursday, allowing anyone to chime in who’s currently traveling or enduring family. Please, let’s keep the tourney fun and positive, as one neighborhood rises above the rest in very public fashion. The quest to crown a champion resumes now!

…

(2) Inman Park

Courtesy of Painted Hospitality

Inarguably one of Atlanta’s most charming neighborhoods, the city’s “first planned suburb” remains a beautiful, fascinating amalgam of Victorian homes, useful greenspaces, transit/Beltline accessibility, and well-planned commercial hubs along North Highland Avenue, Krog Street, and elsewhere. For more than 50 years, Inman Park has also hosted one of the city’s best neighborhood festivals—no small feat in festival-happy ATL.

This year’s most splashy addition was the adaptive-reuse Painted Park, an expanded dining and entertainment concept borne of the old Parish space along the Eastside Trail. Elsewhere, the expansion of a 1950s complex promises to add vibrancy to Inman Park’s main commercial crossroads. Despite its attributes, Inman Park hasn’t taken the crown in one of these criteria-free contests since the very first one, way back in 2011. Can a strong ’24 change that?

…

(7) Cabbagetown

A typically quaint Cabbagetown street. Google Maps

As proven in its decisive Round 1 triumph over mighty Buckhead, Cabbagetown’s diminutive size shouldn’t be underestimated, because its sense of pride is so enormous. On the sensible urban-planning front, this year saw a two-way, protected cycle track added through Cabbagetown that provides a better connection to both the Beltline’s Eastside Trail and west toward downtown.

Otherwise, apart from infrastructure fixes in the Krog Street Tunnel, major changes in Cabbagetown were as few and far between as actual homes for sale. (Precisely two C-town houses are on the market right now, both of them priced north of $730,000.) That speaks to the charming neighborhood’s cachet—and locals’ unwillingness to leave.