Robert Inman

Born in Los Angeles, Robert (Bob) Inman has spent all but four of his years in the City of the Angels. Inman was a student of Dr. Robert W. Winter at Occidental College and it was here that he gained a lifelong enthusiasm for the built environment of Los Angeles. Bob enjoyed a 40-year career in transportation logistics, arranging for transportation of fresh fruits and vegetables grown in California and in Arizona. His initial published work, Paris 1945, is an image-based narrative describing his father Clarence Inman’s work with the OSS Field Photo Branch in World War II.

A lifelong walking and hiking enthusiast, he began to embrace urban walking in greater Los Angeles as an avocation in 2005. He adopted the public stairways of Los Angeles as an area of advocacy. In 2008, he published A Guide to the Stairways of Los Angeles. In the following dozen years he has led over 6500 participants on more than 260 urban walks that serve as a hybrid of a fitness walk as well as a narrated city discovery activities. In 2011, Inman co-invented and designed the 230-mile “Inman 300”, which is called “America’s first urban thru-hike”. In 2013, Inman published Finding Los Angeles by Foot: Stairstreet, bridge, pathway and lane. In 2016, he was awarded the Ray Bradbury Community Walking Champion award from a pedestrian advocacy group, Los Angeles Walks.

In 2015, Inman entered a collaboration with Dr. Robert W. Winter and with Angel City Press to completely update and re-release the seminal guidebook to Los Angeles architecture. This would be the last of a series that Winter began with David Gebhard in 1965. An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles: Fully Revised 6th Edition was published in December 2018.

Inman latest book is Urban Hikes Southern California, published by Falcon Guides in May 2021. Bob Inman is married to Barbara May and they live in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Eagle Rock. He may be reached at eaglerocker55@pacbell.net.