Parking History At The National Building Museum

On the spot: Putting parking in its proper place

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Let's look at the parking data points. Last month the National Building Museum opened an exhibition devoted entirely to the subject of parking, its architecture and social history, from the highs and lows of parking structure design to historical artifacts -- a 1930s guidebook listing parking lots open to African Americans -- that prove no matter what odd thread you tug in the fabric of Americana, you often get the same, dispiriting story. The exhibition coincided with a mostly overlooked convention, the Parking Show of Shows hosted by the National Parking Association, which held its annual meeting at National Harbor a few weeks ago. Which came only a few days after The Washington Post reported on a scandalously high-priced and underutilized parking garage built with public funds in Columbia Heights.

Three parking narratives, with three very different morals. The Building Museum's fascinating and comprehensive "House of Cars" exhibition takes parking for granted, and from that assumption tries to cover the subject dispassionately. It proves that parking structures needn't be ugly, that they were once more routinely beautiful and integrated into the urban fabric, and that even today they can be architecturally daring if real architects are allowed to explore the poetry of the structure. The Parking Show of Shows -- an exhibition for parking professionals that featured the cutting edge of parking technology and design -- didn't just take parking for granted as a necessity, it loved everything about parking, from the latest designs for sustainable lighting fixtures to a new age of robotic parking valets that may revolutionize the way we store our cars.

But it was the odd story of a parking structure in Columbia Heights, built by the city with $40 million of taxpayers' money, that may be the most pertinent data point in the future of parking. Here was a classic case of how good intentions can get fouled up with old-fashioned civic extortion. The retailer Target demanded the garage as a condition of moving to the city. The city built it. But something strange happened along the way: The expected hordes of drivers didn't materialize. They came by foot, by Metro, but not in cars, at least not in the numbers projected, and now the lot is losing money, costing the city some $100,000 per month.

Stories like this, popping up around the country, may portend a seismic shift in how we think about parking.

A colorful history

But first, the history. Almost every type of modern structure, from prisons to hospitals to airports, has been anatomized by someone, and parking structures are no exception. In January 2008, author and historian Shannon Sanders McDonald visited the Library of Congress to lecture about her book "The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form." McDonald was an adviser to the National Building Museum exhibition (which received funding from the NPA), and the spirit of her book pervades much of the current show. Parking, they both demonstrate, is far more interesting than anyone ever thought.

Early cars were remarkably sensitive little beasts, more hygienic than horses (which left manure in the streets, and sometimes their mortal carcass, too), but also more sensitive to the elements than today's cars. With leather seats, open tops and finicky engines, cars needed protection from cold and rain, and thus early parking garages tended to look like other buildings where we store things. They were often masonry structures, sometimes with windows, built to a scale in line with local neighborhoods. Look at an early garage, and it's not necessarily clear that it's a garage.

Which is to say, early garages weren't as hideously ugly as the famous Cage Garage -- built in 1933 in Boston -- which appears in McDonald's book and the National Building Museum exhibition. As cars grew up, as gasoline became an all-weather commodity and cars became comfortable cocoons with sturdy metal shells, garages no longer needed to be impervious to weather. The Cage Garage was essentially the garage we are all so sadly familiar with today: a forbidding stack of open decks, a perfect example of form following function and an even better example of why form shouldn't always follow function. It was torn down in 1985, but the damage was done. A basic tolerance for ugly parking structures, a particularly soul-killing type of architecture that would blight whole neighborhoods and rend the urban fabric of so many once-walkable downtowns, had entered the American system.

Because parking, after all, was a necessity.

Or perhaps it was a right, a fundamental freedom that came hand in hand with the freedom to drive, to be mobile, to push out from the gritty city farther and farther into the once-green hinterlands. Without parking, there could be no driving. And that sense of parking as a fundamental right expressed itself in the self-park garage, most of them just as ugly as the Cage Garage. But self-parking also meant absolute freedom to come and go, to keep one's own schedule. And avoid any of the social interaction that you might have had waiting for your car.

As self-parking became the parking ideal -- you can see how aesthetically appealing it was in historic videos which show cars ascending gentle ramps with almost voluptuous ease -- parking garages were redesigned with safer and more negotiable ramps. But self-park came at a cost: You couldn't fit as many cars in. Which meant that garages got bigger and more forbidding in their appearance.

The exhibition deals with this issue clinically, exploring the innovations in ramp systems and latter-day efforts to hide and cloak the garage with a more genial face. But there was no hiding the damage these buildings were doing. A 1967 photograph from Anchorage shows a gigantic parking structure dwarfing everything around it, as if the city itself is an afterthought.

There was an era, says Sarah Leavitt, curator of the National Building Museum show, when cities took pride in these structures. But that pride, based on the sense that a modern city couldn't progress without adequate parking, hid a darker indifference to the historical fabric of the city. The exhibition also includes before-and-after shots of a block of F Street NW, showing the loss of two historic buildings to a hideous parking garage built next to the Hotel Washington. It also includes an image of one of the most notorious parking garages in the world, the Michigan Theater in Detroit, made by slamming concrete decks into the shell of a classic and beautifully ornamented movie house. To this day, people still park there surrounded by the ghostly architectural shadow of a building once meant to please and delight.

Dealing with a nightmare

The self-park lot didn't have to be ugly. Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect, managed to design a not-hideous garage for the Milwaukee Art Museum; the parking structure expresses its form both honestly and with graceful and appealing repetitions of gentle, rounded-V-shape supports. But for all the beautiful images of parking done well, it's the nightmare images that haunt one in this exhibition. Some of the most fascinating material is found in a room devoted to parking as seen in contemporary art and popular culture. In film, we find a recurrent trope: the parking lot as site of social discord, violence and anomie. In the 1961 film version of "West Side Story," the boys rumble in a parking lot. In 1976's "All the President's Men," Deep Throat unfolds his unbelievably big conspiracy in a subterranean, and empty, parking lot.

The emptiness of parking lots haunts the imagination of several contemporary artists, including Carsten Meier, whose large-format photograph of a vacant top deck of a garage in Columbus, Ohio, makes the space feel post-apocalyptic. The same whistling emptiness can be felt in a video by Peter Rose, and in a sculpture by Rita McBride, which reproduces the bracingly spare lines of a standard, open-deck garage in nickel silver. But without cars. Two ideas emerge from this room: that parking has always been the dark side of the driving dream, and that the geometric ugliness of so many garages is a byproduct of architects who were, in fact, aesthetically drawn to the plain, simple planes and angles of the form. Architects often have strange ideas.

None of this metaphysical angst was on display at the Parking Show of Shows. At one booth, J.A. Uniforms was hawking handsome five-button red vests with epaulets, modern-day livery for the old-fashioned valet. Across the room, Woody Nash of Boomerang Systems was promoting the "world's only free-roaming" robot valet. It's a fascinating system that harks back to the days of the old automated garage. By retrofitting existing garages with sensors, crawling robots can slide under your vehicle, lift it and carry it to a parking spot without opening the driver's door.

"They can move laterally and spin on a dime," Nash said. "And they never take coins out of the coin holder."

But the future isn't all bright for the National Parking Association. Away from the exhibition hall, with its free-flowing red wine and mini-burgers, participants gathered to hear lawyer and lobbyist Vincent Petraro describe how he helped keep at bay a New York proposal to institute "congestion pricing" in the gridlocked south end of Manhattan. This new user fee would charge drivers entering the zone from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Proponents hope it will clear up the streets, clean up the air and generate revenue. Petraro worries that it will hurt business. He cites London, which instituted a similar plan in 2003.

"Yeah it worked, if you want to create a ghost town," Petraro says of a city that at last check was anything but a ghost town.

Congestion pricing, says Prof. Donald Shoup of UCLA, could hurt the bottom line for parking lot owners. The power of that bottom line was obvious throughout the Parking Show of Shows, where even bright signs -- environmentally sustainable lighting and other improvements to design -- were predicated on their cost savings. But Shoup, who studies the economics of parking, is interested in a different, more civic-oriented bottom line. He argues that parking is yet one more element of the basic American infrastructure that hasn't been subjected to the basic rules of the market. Cities all too often under-price their parking meters, which explains why drivers tie up traffic cruising for a cheap space. And for decades cities have required developers to include parking as part of new construction, which hides the real cost -- economic and environmental -- of parking.

Which brings us to Columbia Heights, and yet another parking boondoggle. But this may also be the future of parking: Less is more. Most of the larger discussion of parking, including the dialogue at the National Parking Association and to a somewhat disturbing extent in the National Building Museum exhibition, is predicated on the idea that parking is a necessity. That it can be improved, but not eliminated. Even the act of studying parking as an evolving architectural form all too often seems to legitimize that form. But the emptiness of that lot in Columbia Heights, and the nightmare images on display at the "House of Cars" show, suggest that we may not be nearly as addicted to parking as we once believed.

There may, in fact, be life after parking, especially if cities begin to treat it more like smoking -- a public nuisance to be pushed to the limits of the urban infrastructure -- than a public right, to be accommodated no matter what the cost. And those haunting images of empty lots and vacant parking decks? Perhaps they were fantasies, not nightmares, portents of a better, more rational, healthier and greener world.

One can dream.

House of Cars Through July 11 at the National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW. Call 202-272-2448 or visit http://www.nbm.org.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/29/AR2009102905230.html

Pleasant Plains, DC

The District's Overlooked 'Bull's-Eye'
Pleasant Plains Strives To Make a Name for Itself

By Ann Cameron Siegal
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, October 17, 2009

District residents and community groups are working to get one Northwest neighborhood some recognition -- because few people even know it exists.

E. Gail Anderson Holness said her community of Pleasant Plains is "the bull's-eye of D.C." Holness, who serves on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission for Ward 1, moved to Pleasant Plains more than two decades ago because of its proximity to Howard University. She graduated from Howard's law school in 1981. "Some neighbors have been here over 40 years," she said. "Their children grew up with each other."

Defining Pleasant Plains is not an easy task. Its boundaries shift depending on who is describing them. Real estate agents use narrower parameters than the community's civic association does, probably for marketing purposes. Nearby communities, such as Columbia Heights, have names that are better known.

Located north of Florida Avenue and east of Sherman Avenue, Pleasant Plains has brick, dormered Wardman-style rowhouses and Federal-style houses, including many with front porches set 20 steps or more above street level.

The bustle of Georgia Avenue seems to melt away on the residential side streets. Residents gather at small local hangouts, such as Sankofa Video and Books, Soul Vegetarian, and the Howard Deli -- a fixture in the community since the 1930s.

In the 1700s, Pleasant Plains was the name of a large colonial estate stretching from present-day 16th Street NW to Howard University and owned by the Holmead family. Over time, chunks were parceled out, eventually becoming the neighborhoods of Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights and Park View. Today's Pleasant Plains is what was left over, said Sylvia Robinson, a resident and co-founder of the Pleasant Plains Neighborhood Network.

Jo Strowder and Margaret Weusi bought their home more than a decade ago. "It's brick with hardwood floors, a sunroom, a finished basement and parking in the back," Strowder said. Because of shallow bedrock, not all Pleasant Plains houses have basements.

Strowder said she appreciates the camaraderie on her street -- an atmosphere that reminds her of her childhood in the 1950s and '60s. "Residents are concerned about keeping their properties up," she said. "We holler across the street and water each other's yards."

A year ago, Ian and Sarah Pienik moved next door to Strowder and began transforming their steep hillside into a garden. Ian Pienik rattles off the name of each neighbor who donated plants for the project. Strowder, whose own yard has a plethora of thriving plants, said of the Pieniks, "These two are setting the pace as far as yards go."

The Pieniks bought a fixer-upper because they wanted to put their own thumbprint on the house, Ian Pienik said. "There's a Mount Pleasant feel to it," he said.

Efforts to revive what Holness referred to as "a community's community" are multifaceted. Residents are relying on individual initiatives to define their neighborhood. For example, since the Pieniks landscaped the tree boxes in front of their early-1900s house, others on the block followed suit.

Robinson, a former computer analyst, grew up a few blocks away in Petworth. She is now working to create ties that bind Pleasant Plains residents together -- keeping them abreast of civic issues and encouraging them to become active members of the community.

Catalysts toward that end include the Pleasant Plains Civic Association, the Emergence Community Arts Collective and Mentoring Works2, all part of the neighborhood network.

Darren Jones, president of the civic association, grew up in the neighborhood and bought his own home there in 1993. "My family has always been involved in the community," he said. He graduated from Banneker when it was a junior high school, and his niece recently graduated from Banneker High School.

The arts collective arose from Robinson's dream of creating a center where neighborhood residents could get to know and learn from one another. During the two years of work it took to get the once-dilapidated building at 733 Euclid St. NW into shape, she found a volunteer spirit she hadn't expected. What started out as a request for one weekend of assistance turned into a lot of volunteers contributing more than 650 hours of manual labor.

Robinson also discovered the house had an extensive history helping women and children through difficult times. For three decades, beginning in the 1930s, it was the Meriwether Home for Children. Today, the "Emerging Women" exhibit tells the story of those connected with the building's mission.

The arts collective opened in 2006 and hosts art classes, social activities, educational seminars and support groups.

Mentoring Works2, which also started in 2006, engages local youths in community service projects. It is devising a network for door-to-door newsletter delivery. "One of our biggest obstacles [to community networking] is communication," Jones said. "Many of our older residents aren't connected to e-mail."

The Pleasant Plains Neighborhood Network is also working on a walkable heritage trail that will highlight 18 points in the neighborhood's educational, industrial and business past. Residents are being proactive in trying to define the incoming Howard Town Center along Georgia Avenue, rather than leaving all the decisions to developers. Emerging as Pleasant Plains "want-to-haves" are small, sustainable businesses; sit-down restaurants; and a grocery store. "We don't want to see big-box stores," said Jones. Plenty of those are available in nearby Columbia Heights.

New landscaping and speed-control measures are slated for Sherman Avenue, which has become a major commuter route as drivers bypass Georgia Avenue. A planned tree-lined median strip will reduce Sherman Avenue to one lane of traffic in each direction, returning that street to a neighborhood boulevard rather than a thoroughfare. With all the changes on the horizon, Strowder said she stays in Pleasant Plains because "there's so much going on in this little microcosm of a community, including all that's available at Howard." In fact, a lot of Howard alumni live in this neighborhood, said ANC Commissioner Thomas Smith, a Howard grad himself. Pleasant Plains is "a melting pot within a melting pot," said Smith.

Jones, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress, said, "This is a great place for public transportation." Robinson, who doesn't own a car, agreed, listing the four Metro stops within walking distance. (They are Georgia Avenue-Petworth, Columbia Heights, U Street and Shaw-Howard University on the Yellow and Green lines.)

For Holness, Pleasant Plains will continue to be difficult to define "until you name something after it." There are celebrations for Columbia Heights Day and Georgia Avenue Day. "Maybe it's time to have a Pleasant Plains Day," she said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/16/AR2009101600084.html

Pleasant Plains resident Sylvia Robinson fulfilled a dream of creating a thriving community center. (By Ann Cameron Siegal For The Washington Post)

Pleasant Plains

Saturday, October 17, 2009

BOUNDARIES: Park Road NW to the north, Florida Avenue NW to the south, Warder and Sixth streets NW to the east, and Sherman Avenue NW to the west. (The civic association extends the western boundary to 14th Street.)

SCHOOLS: Harriet Tubman Elementary School, Park View Elementary School, Garnett-Patterson Middle School, Howard University Middle School of Math and Science, Banneker High School, Cardozo High School.

HOME SALES: Thirty-one houses are on the market, from $149,900 (for an as-is shell) to $519,700, according to Sheila Cross Reid, president of Avanti Real Estate. The median selling price over the past few months was $334,800.

WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE: Four Metro stations on the Green and Yellow lines, shopping, restaurants, Columbia Heights, the U Street corridor.

WITHIN 10 MINUTES BY CAR: National Zoo, Rock Creek Park, George Washington University, the White House.

Pleasant Plains residents on Fairmont Street NW share plants to landscape their steep front yards.