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Jane Holtz Kay searches from Main Street to megastructures to answer the eternal question, "Where's my car?"
"CITY DITTY"
HERE LIES AN URBAN GENTLEMAN,
WHO FAILED TO MAKE HIS MARK,
HE DIED WITH HIS LIFETIME SQUANDERED,
HUNTING SOME PLACE TO HARK.
-R Omar Barker, 1946
The history of parking can be summed up in the immortal words of that fate-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 Ambersions, "Automobiles have come and almost all outward things and 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 architecure.
To be sure, at first it was movement, not stasis, that 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 reliable, utilitarian vehicle, available, he quipped, in "any color so long as it was black," insured 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. Both the farmer saddled with a pricey rail monopoly to deliver his goods and the city dweller who craved more movility 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.
Americans, reared with a use-it-up, wear-it-out, make-it-do-or-do-without mentality, at first simply adapted the new technology to established architectural ways. Pricey toys for the rich, early cars dwelled in old carriage houses or stables that were minature replicas of the main house. Gradually, the carriage house evolved into a tornt of its own; a spit-and-polish repair shop for the vehicle, often with chauffeur curn-mechanic living above, and even a gas pump out front.
As middle-class suburban...