Track1 :: Track2 :: Track3 :: Track4 :: Track5 :: Track6 :: Track7 :: Track8 :: Track9 :: Track10 :: Track11
Suggested Driving Tour
The Brooklyn Academy of Music's South Site - a redevelopment project takign place on the site of a former municipal parking lot, near the intersection of Ashland Pl. & Hanson Pl. The 229 seat Theatre for a New Audience, designed by Frank Gehry, is being built at the site.
An Edison Park Fast Parking Lot On Livingston, near Smith St. Edison is run by Edison Properties, LLC.
The Grant Ave Municipal Parking Field at the intersection of Pitkin Ave. and Grant Ave.
In their book "Lots of Parking," John Jackle and Keith Sculle write:
“America’s geography has been fully impacted by the logistics of
car storage. The space needed for vehicular storage in America equals, if not
exceeds that for vehicular movement.”
Yet, Eisenhower's Highway Act of 1956 included no funding for parking, leaving cities to their own devices in dealing with the storage problem created by automobility. As a result, cities resorted to the cheapest and quickest solution: open surface lots. Parking experts estimate that 80% of all parking in the United States takes place on these flat, open-air lots. This is not surprising when one compares the cost of this solution with multi-story or underground structures. That difference can be between a $10,000 parking space and a $24,000 one in locations with high land prices like Southern California, where the automobile is king.
While parking is probably most thought of as a late 20th Century phenomenon, the struggle to deal with stationary automobiles had been felt before mid century. As early as 1920, the city of Los Angeles struggled with gridlock in its downtown business district, and banned parking in its urban core. The ban, however, was quickly repealed after the city was overtaken by outraged motorists and their vehicles. But the story of parking is not to be told as one solely about "America's love for its cars" or our national pride in individual speed, mobility, and horizontality.
Even before the circulatory highway system and suburbanization that followed WW II, parking was seen as an issue that could make or break cities. During the Great Depression the country’s urban cores struggled. In that era of New Deals and government solutions, business leaders called on local governments to intervene in the form of parking solutions. As early as 1930, the city of Kalamazoo, Michigan would pioneer the development of municipal parking lots. Cities, and their politicians, needed to keep their downtowns economically vital, as they were a prime source of the tax revenue, then helping to fund modernization projects and civil services. The zoning regulations of the 1920s would help organize the expanding mobility and mass of capital. By 1942, one of five cities with populations over 10,000 would operate municipal downtown parking lots, most of them being free. Municipal lots were not limited to the pre-war economic crisis. With the development of the Highway Act, federal housing subsidies, and suburban malls, the threats to the welfare of urban business districts continued. Cities found municipal lots one way to retain the tax dollars that were relocating to outlying shopping centers offering cheap real estate, fewer zoning and labor regulations and large expansive parking lots.
One way of reading the history of municipal parking programs is that they represent an instance of appropriate government intervention into the otherwise naturally operating market. Local governments had to create a solution, as their tax base was symbiotic with the success of businesses operating within their jurisdictions. Along with the economic imperative driving parking development were needs for legal and spatial regulations to stabilize the chaos forming in the wake of the combustion engine. In 1941, Philadelphia set a precedent by creating a parking lot ordinance establishing norms for things like lighting, pricing and signage. Eight years later, 185 cities had parking regulations that were integrated into zoning laws and land use policies.
But municipal lots were not simply the work of benevolent government actors, desperately trying to keep their metropolitan cities, and values, alive. As historians and scholars like John Mollenkopf have argued, the land use struggles that began before the war would prove to be a defining issue in partisan politics. If the New and Fair Deals of FDR and Truman represented a faith in the government to plan the post-industrial American city, Eisenhower's administration envisioned the government as a more direct advocate for commercial interests. Any emphasis on urban housing and community welfare was redirected to suburbanization and "market" solutions to inner-city problems. Although the 1960s would usher in Kennedy's "New Frontier" and Johnson's "Great Society," both with interests in central cities, such Liberal programs would prove more effective at "patterning political participation," as Mollenkopf notes, than actually investing in urban communities.
The perceived need for parking in center cities would compliment the desires of post-industrial captains to reshape the urban landscape in their own image. Peter Norton's account of US transportation policy documents the ties between the construction of automobile infrastructure and "slum clearance" programs that continued through the 1960s. Parking lots were frequently placed on the site of demolished low-income housing stock under freeway "rights of way" policies. Through the collaboration of city governments and organized business interests, such programs even displaced smaller businesses in order to create parking for large banks, department stores and hospitals. Jackle and Sculle go so far as to say that the progress of cities became measured by the number of parking lots rather than architectural construction. If earlier utopian urbanists desired a "garden city" filled with parks, by mid-century, the utopian city would be filled with parking lots.
While municipal lots have not entirely disappeared -- in the New York City Metropolitan area there are 59 city run lots, 45 in Brooklyn and Queens together, 3 in Manhattan -- parking has, like many aspects of American infrastructure, become a largely privatized industry. Now, large firms based in the parking industry and industry organizations (the National Parking Association and the International Parking Institute being the largest) run the show. As central cities become more commonly known as Central Business Districts, urban surface parking lots, both municipal and private, are revealing themselves to be more valuable as liquid real estate than as functioning parking facilities. Municipal Lot 1, a five acre city-run parking lot, in the Flushing area of Queens (at 37th and Union) was recently purchased by the Economic Development Corporation with plans to build a theater, retail stores and one acre of “openspace,” and valued at $80-100 million. The Brooklyn Academy of Music's Local Development Corporation has created a master plan for a "cultural corridor" in the Fort Greene area (designed with famed architects Rem Koolhaas and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro) utilizing city-owned parking lots as a cache of available space. Neighborhood activists have been critical of such desires to "culture up" the neighborhood, as the plans appear to displace the cultural, and economic, capital of those already there, while elevating the property values of speculative developers, like Bruce Ratner -- developer and owner of the nearby Metrotech Center and Atlantic Center Mall, who is also on the BAM Board of Trustees.
The days of empty urban parking lots, designed to serve only 85% of their potential capacity, seem to be coming to a close. In their place are the more lucrative ventures serving the new urban needs of office parks and luxury condos. For many, this is progress. New Urbanists, have long derided the “simple landscape” of parking lots as an ugly waste of space at best. But even worse than their aesthetic crimes, are their economic ones, according to some, like UCLA urban planning scholar Donald Shoup. The requirement that commercial and residential buildings require off-street parking in many cities represents a public subsidy of “free” parking in the neighborhood of $374 billion per year. The costs of free, or cheap, parking are hidden in higher housing costs, higher taxes, and environmental degradation. By valuing parking at rates based on supply and demand, Shoup figures that the market can solve the problems created by decades of urban planning policies.
In the early 16th Century, Sir Thomas More wrote in his famed text Utopia
that the fictional citizens considered wasted land a “just cause of war,
for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil, of which
they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated.” The
connection between land use, utopian desires and conflict seem as present in
today’s reality as in his pre-modern fiction. Through his account of “Drosscapes,” Alan
Berger argues that both anti-sprawl New Urbanists and suburban horizontalists
view the conflict over land use to be essentially one over waste. As Berger
notes, urban life and waste are inseparable, it’s the different interpretations
of waste, the different utopian visions, that generate the conflict.
Despite the stark difference in land use policies between the anti- and pro-sprawl
constituencies, there is historical reason to be concerned about another component
of land use that seems to be considered “waste” by both sides:
whole populations of people. The urban descendants of those who lost their
housing and employment in the construction of urban surface lots are likely
those being displaced as those same lots are built over with condos and “multi-use” office
complexes. If there is a war going on over land use, it’s being fought
by factions of the same army, on the soil of unwilling participants.