A Brief History of Parking: The Life and After-life of Paving the Planet

By Jane Holtz Kay

"City Ditty"
Here lies an urban gentleman,
Who failed to make his mark,
He died with his lifetime squandered,
Hunting some place to park.
-R. Omar Barker, 1946

The History of Parking can be summed in the immortal words of that late-departed chariot driver, Julius Caesar: "Veni, Vidi, Vici." The car came, it saw, it conquered. Or, as Booth Tarkington predicted in his 1918 novel The Magnificent Ambersons, "Automobiles have come and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring."

One outward and most unpredictable thing the motorcar brought was the need for its own storage. In repose, as well as in motion, it took space. And, as form follows function, what that need for parking eventually wrought on "all outward things" was a new sense of priorities for space, and hence architecture.

At first, to be sure, movement, not stasis, mattered most for the infant auto. Before the advent of Henry Ford's 1908 Model T, the popular machine for the masses, motorcars had languished all too regularly in the shop or gotten stuck in the mud. Ford's utilitarian vehicle, available, he quipped, in "any color so long as it was black," insured reliability, uniformity of parts and performance, and supplied its workers with the living wage (more or less) to buy it.

In near tandem, then, the Machine Age and the Motor Age were born. The farmer, saddled with a pricey rail monopoly to deliver his goods, and the city dweller, craving more mobility than a streetcar, signed on to the self-propelled vehicle. Still, if going, not resting, concerned the nation, some shelter had to cover the not-always-hardy vehicle.

Early on, Americans, reared with a use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without mentality, simply adapted the new technology to established architectural ways. The early cars, pricey toys for the rich, dwelled in old carriage houses or stables which were miniature replicas of the main house. Gradually, the carriage house evolved into a form of its own: a spit-and-polish repair shop for the vehicle, often with a chauffeur-cum-mechanic living above and even a gas pump out front.

As middle-class suburban dwellers bought their own cars, their smaller houses sprouted wooden or brick garages - detached from the house lest the new-fangled machine explode and take the family along with it. This more modest homeowner's garage might still be built to match the architecture of the parent house, or arrive bundled in a kit from Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward. Soon, a more modish home for the new vehicle emerged when Frank Lloyd Wright, as enthralled with the motorcar as any Hollywood star, brought not only architectural modernity but mobility to one of his Oak Park homes in the form of a built-in garage and sketched a design for a service station.

Even in more urban quarters, automobile-oriented architecture arrived early. Nothing quite matched the brick Colonial façade of Marshall and Fox's 1907 Chicago Automobile Club, which allowed vehicular entry from the street and parking space on every floor. Ernest Flagg also designed a domestic version, with an arched entrance and garage inside his personal dwelling. Architectural Record called it "A New Type of City House." Routine apartment builders also squeezed out space for the car within or behind their multi-family residences.

Indeed, they had to as the number of American cars mushroomed to nine million in the teens. And not just on the home front, for now the nomadic motor vehicle was beginning to demand parking downtown. At first, the curb, the former resting place of the horse and buggy, sufficed. Giving many of the nation's 14 million horses their walking papers helped both urban space and sanitation needs, freeing up the cityscape. At the same time, it paved the way for more - and more - cars to come. And, as the '20s advanced, so did downtown streetside congestion. "No place to park" began to join that other mantra, "stuck in traffic, " as the automobile took hold.

Downtown businesses soon found themselves engaged in finding new lodgings for the influx of motorcars. The old expedients for parking - the open lot, farm yard, stable, or barn in the country; the warehouse or empty industrial building in the city - no longer offered enough space for the mounting number of motorists. City planners turned to new quarters for their cars. These ranged from dropping "day-storage" spaces for cars into the light wells of existing buildings to following the portentous instructions of William Phelps Eno, a planner who set America's first parking codes, to take down trees for parking.

As early as 1918, pioneering Chicago began to innovate new architectural designs to keep cars out of sight and protect its skyscraper city. (For a while, it even banned parking in the Loop.) Holabird and Roche designed a vertically-stacked 5-story structure with a spiraling ramp for the Hotel La Salle. Attempts to move cars in and out of such garages more quickly inspired architects to create new technologies - Ferris wheel-like inventions, turntables, transfer carriages, or combinations of elevators and ramps - and prompted garage owners to hire busy attendants.

These measures barely helped. "The right to move a car is superior to the right to store cars on the public way," city planners observed in American City Magazine, in the late twenties. Their colleagues debated the merits of double parking, and of angled vs. curbside parking. "Aside from the weather there is no question more discussed in our cities today than that of automobile parking," the United States Conference of Cities declared in 1928. "Where Shall They Park?" the National Safety Council titled the published proceedings of a Chicago meeting, damning both double and angle parking as obstructions to traffic flow. "The driver who engages in it shows little regard for the rights of others," the document declared.

Where shall they park? The answer became clear as more and more municipalities, from Los Angeles to smaller centers, voted for city-funded open lots. With that space grab came another staple: the flattening of unprofitable structures and a foretaste of the coming bulldozer approach to urban America. At mid-decade, Andrew Mellon, secretary of the treasury, told Colliers magazine that he would like to move the Washington Monument for more parking lots.

The architectural elements on these lots were minimal, to say the least - a mere dot of an attendant's booth, typically. By and large, parking was still impromptu and helter skelter into the '30s, say historians. The Model A and its heirs filled up piers in New York. In Pittsburgh, "they just parked them on the levee of the Monongahela, angled towards the river," recalls architectural historian Arthur Krim.

At home, as the car became less explosive, owners looked for elegance; even the house itself seemed fit for a storage center. "Why not keep your automobile in the house?" Charles Alma Byers, had asked in Keith's magazine in 1920. As the decade progressed, not everyone agreed: Architects Keck and Keck's own four-story co-op apartment, fronted by a three-car garage entranceway, upset their Chicago neighbors, if not the two architects who lived there. Yet, the trend to stylish car shelters advanced. Even Babbitt drove into a terra-cotta garage in Sinclair Lewis' Main Street.

In Boston, in 1927, architects would give their prestigious Harleston Parker prize to Park Square's Motor Mart garage, a multi-story, ornamented building by Ralph Harrington Done. Elsewhere, Deco motifs garnished an automated skyscraper garage northwest of New York City's Columbus Circle. The Ritz in Chicago's Hyde Park boasted terra cotta insignia of gears and winged wheels, while Norman Bel Geddes' 1931 "House of Tomorrow" - created, as he wrote, "in the spirit of the age" - featured a streamlined moderne circular bay wrapped around a two-car garage.

The Century of Progress Centennial Celebration of the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 went even further with a truly splendiferous garage. "The World's Largest Parking Terminal," it boasted a capacity of 24,000 cars plus a "climb-proof" fence, floodlighting at night, and policing every minute during the Exposition. "Parking reservations are as important as your hotel reservations," declared promotional literature, listing attendants and chauffeurs, beauty and barber shops, a drug store, and greasing and washing services within the imposing structure - the epitome of one-stop stopping.

Parking was simultaneously revolutionizing architecture in yet another manner. As early as 1922, America set off on its trip From Main Street to Miracle Mile, as historian Chester Liebs describes the development of the road culture that eventually replaced the sidewalk with the strip. In 1923, J.C. Nichols created what some call the first shopping mall, Kansas City's Country Club Plaza, a Spanish architectural fantasia of turrets - wrapped around parking lots and a multi-level garage.

No one knows exactly where "curb service" began on Main Street in the '30s but its destiny on the highway was almost preordained. By 1939, U.S. Route l, between New York City and Trenton, New Jersey, had 500 billboards, 300 gas stations, and 400 other drive-in businesses with vast parking lots. Long before those two California brothers, Maurice and Richard McDonald, spread the concept of 15¢ hamburgers from their first Main Street store to the crossroads of America, their behind-the-wheel meal style helped dictate the design of drive-through or drive-in banks, markets, movies, and stores. They had paved the road to today's post-millennial stripscape, where asphalt-islanded Wal-Marts generate 10,000 car trips a day.

Despite these portents of the primacy of parking, even before World War II the notion that the only good car storage was invisible garage storage also had adherents. San Francisco's Union Square led the way underground in 1942. Excavating four stories down, this municipal parking garage not only housed l,700 vehicles but boasted of "pre-war possibilities as an air raid shelter" in promotional brochures.

After the war, the "transportation affliction," as Wilbur Smith, chairman of New York City's Department of Traffic Operation, described the situation to New Yorkers, undid this urge for an architectural vanishing act: cities got into the parking business. Combined with federal housing subsidies, the motorcar's growing takeover of space would score the final path of outward-bound, highway-bound Americans. "Better Parking is Good Business" was the urban dictum in 1952. Stimulated by the Highway Defense Act of 1956 and urban renewal, the war-bred machine to pave paradise rolled across the country, as classic buildings such as those on Newport's Bellevue Avenue became concrete-and-asphalt shopping centers and landmarks of public transportation like Penn Station tumbled.

The result, as one British visitor reported to the Architectural Association, was a nation where houses built by Richard Neutra and other modernists in California "could only be discovered like nuggets of gold in this waste of asphalt and wire."

Americans didn't see it that way. The vivid, car-catching signage of the 1950s drew them to the strip and to motel-based resorts like New Jersey's Wildwood. The suburbs, similarly, upped the ratio of driveway to house. A photo of a house-of-the-future with a "living garage" appeared in a 1958 House and Garden; it depicted a Chevy parked inside the living room across from the divan.

In the post-war downtown, parking these New Look vehicles took precedence, prompting storefront merchants to claim victory in their competition with the burgeoning suburbs. In 1946, only 70 cities had parking requirements in their zoning plans; a decade later, at the dawn of the interstate age, most did. And, as urban renewal served as a tool for struggling cities to flatten themselves for parking spaces and widen roads to relieve congestion, urban officials themselves lifted up the light rail lines to provide room. L.A.'s "Big Red" cars took their last run in the late 1950s, while Chicago Mayor William Daley boasted of the nine parking facilities built or in construction in his town in a 1960 Board of Parking publication.

Out where the green grass grew, postwar affluence was breeding a nation of consumers and mall-goers. Whether to serve Victor Gruen's futuristic structures, domed shopping malls, or drive-through food chains like McDonald's, suburban parking proliferated and urban parking swelled to beat it.

Parking did not remain America's Most Important Product forever. By the early seventies, the freeway revolt, the oil Embargo panic, environmental and preservation consciousness, and "eyesore" epithets on the fast food free-for-all combined with "advocacy planning" to shift the dwelling place for the car. Some cities had always resisted the urge to demolish their architectural heritage. Even in the time of tailfins, Pittsburgh, among other cities, still buried its parking garage under a downtown park. Cars also began to go under architectural cover. Sometimes it seemed the architect's vision of dolling up this enlarged car-carrying capacity often lead to greater, not better, garage visibility. Kallman and McKinnell's massive and monumental freestanding garage for Boston's Government Center in the late '60s did little to advance the art or urbanity. Paul Rudolph, creating a garage for New Haven's urban renewal makeover, didn't do any better. Such Brutalist attempts to tame the beast brought little improvement to the building type - or the streetscape. In 1972, the National League of Cities counted 6,250,000 spaces in 646 parking lots or garages across the nation.

The inward-turning, enclosed, car-filled architecture of Philip Johnson's IDS building in a languishing Minneapolis or the supposedly problem-solving, tower-cum-parking palliatives of John Portman's Renaissance Center in Detroit were still an architecture of the exit ramp. As the '80s approached, the epitome of parking as formgiving issued from Roche Dinkeloo at Union Carbide's headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut. The building, settling into the isolated greensward of the exurban site, offered rooftop parking connected by a very visible driveway ramp that seamlessly connected the driver/worker to the interchange.

Now and again, to be sure, even architects like Stanley Tigerman - who mostly disdains the mundane needs of parking - might design a folly of a garage: in his case a facility with a façade like a Rolls Royce grille. But as the 21st century neared, the idea that the only good parking is no parking (or at least no visible parking) has gained currency as urban and suburban caretakers continue to try to camouflage or adorn the garage.

In Dallas' gentrifying Uptown district, a lively apartment enclave from Post Properties tucks the automobile out of sight inside five-plus story residential structures that line the street. So, too, the New Urbanism returns to the Old Suburbanism ever more fervently by putting the automobile back behind the house or cozying it up to the curb. Developers in La Brea, about half an hour from Los Angeles, returned to the '20s to put their cars behind a new Main Street-style commercial district, complete with galleries and two 10-screen theaters. Plus ça change.

Portland, Oregon, has also gone against the mega-parking grain with ordinances that insist that three-quarters of a house's facade must be (shazam!) house and (surprise!) not garage. Economically, so-called "cashing out" of parking - paying employees not to use parking - has become a favored option for businesses, anti-auto advocates, and even local governments. Santa Ana, California, gives employees who walk to work a $50 annual shoe subsidy; the EPA is putting freezes on new garages and lots in cities and towns like Houston that don't attain clean air standards.

Statistically, these trends are probably slight compared to the multi-car McMansion garages - built, it seems, to hold the bulging brown bags from big box stores jammed into the bulging backs of SUVs parked therein. With parking lots cutting a swath through the nation, now, as in the motorcar's "Come Away With Me Lucille in My Merry Oldsmobile" infancy, the automobile remains an artifact desperately seeking shelter.

This article appeared in Architecture Magazine, February 2001.

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