PARKING LOT BLIGHT
Many cities across North America have built unsightly above-ground garages,
In some cities you can’t see the city for the parking.
Never mind the forest and the trees, there are Great Plains and mountain ranges of parking, nearly all of it in places there used to be city. From midcentury onwards, cities in North America and beyond devoured themselves in an effort to create more parking for places that were ever-diminishing because of that parking. It remains a vicious asphalt circle.
The Pretenders had a 1982 hit with “My City Was Gone,” an urban lament for lead singer’s Chrissie Hynde’s hometown of Akron, Ohio. “I went back to Ohio / But my city was gone,” she sang. “There was no train station / There was no downtown / South Howard had disappeared / All my favourite places / My city had been pulled down / Reduced to parking spaces / A, o, way to go Ohio.”
A recent visit to Atlantic City on the New Jersey shore revealed perhaps the most extreme example of a parking garage landscape, with the massive casino hotel garages that line the famed boardwalk. They sprawl for blocks behind the casinos; at Caesars they’re disguised as Roman temples, and at Trump’s shuttered and mildew-smelling Taj Mahal as glitzy pastiches of a Raj colonial fantasy. Atlantic City’s garages, from some angles, seemed bigger than the hotels themselves.
Yet visit other American cities, such as Detroit, Denver or Chicago, and you’ll find ubiquitous aboveground parking garages attached to many buildings put up in the last 60 years or so. It’s skylines of parking. The upshot of all those parking skyscrapers is when visiting one of these cities, they offer free panoramic views; always sneak into garages when travelling and take the elevator to the top.
Toronto, in comparison, largely dodged a concrete bullet. In the core we do have some above-grade garages, especially in places like the institutional zones adjacent to University Ave., but they don’t dominate the landscape the way they do in other modern North American cities. Instead, many garages here are underground, with just the gaping maw of the entrance ramps indicating there’s parking down below. As big as some of those maws are, we’re still fortunate the skyline here is mostly offices, shops and homes rather than parking.
Land value in this city has made putting parking underground worth the trouble, even if critics argue we still require too much parking in new developments. Where land is more plentiful in the GTA, up go the cheaper aboveground garages. Where there are visible garages in the core, they were often built at a historic moment when it made economic sense.
Take Harbour Square on Queens Quay W. at Bay St. Its two highrise towers form a rather handsome brutalist zigzag; and then nearer to the ground, they delicately cascade down toward the lake where there’s a public promenade. However, the side most people see along Queens Quay has a beast of a parking garage. It’s a product of its time though; when completed in the early 1970s, Harbour Square was a pioneer on what was still a dirty, post-industrial waterfront, so if it looks like it’s turning its back on the city, it was.
In the decades after the war, downtown Toronto was eviscerated by surface parking lots instead, but they’ve mostly been filled in thanks to the residential building boom. Look at aerial photos from just 25 years ago and the core seems like it was more parking than not, but now only a handful of surface lots remain. We should preserve one of them and put a historic plaque on it, homage to this civic self-destructive era.
Still, parking is a North American obsession, and an emotional one, where feelings and perceptions trump facts wherever the car remains a part of day-to-day life. In Windsor, there’s an ongoing and absurd battle over a municipal parking garage downtown that has retail stores at sidewalk level, making it rather urbane as such things go. Though an incredibly easy town to park in — parking at the Caesar’s Windsor casino garage is free, and the gates are always up, evidence of oversupply — the city of Windsor wants to remove the shops and add more parking to a structure that is rarely, if ever, full. Adding to the controversy is the escalating cost of the conversion.
Windsor is Canada’s Motor City though, and the car is both personal and political. In his forthcoming book, out this September, about Windsor’s history called Five Days Walking Five Towns: Touring Windsor’s Past, journalist and Windsor Poet Laureate Marty Gervais writes of the car’s power over his town and the emotional need for parking:
“Windsor’s focus has always been the manufacture of automobiles. We build them; we buy them, we drive them. We are drivers. Not walkers. Not bus riders . . . Flatten the geography. Make room for the car. If we’re going to walk, we’ll do it from our car to the front door. It’s not about laziness. It’s about daily life. It’s attitude. It’s tradition. It’s the economy. It’s what we’re all about.”
To varying degrees, the same is true in Toronto and other cities that don’t necessarily make the cars, but do drive them. Just look at the massive garages still being constructed at GO train stations around the GTA.
Yet even as the GO parking temples dominate some suburban landscapes, visible parking is being hid- den away elsewhere. Malls were traditionally surrounded by a sea of surface parking, a vaguely sinister place of idling cars and identical rows.
As malls like Yorkdale and Square One have expanded into their lots though, they’ve built garages so parking takes up less space. Expect those not to be around forever though; that land is too valuable.
Bayview Village, adjacent to Bayview subway station, recently announced some of its parking lots will be filled in with an expansion that will include residential units. Over at the Shops at Don Mills, some of the parking lots surrounding that outdoor mall are set to become a residential building inexplicably named “Rodeo Drive.”
In Toronto, parking lots are latent gold mines. High land values have brought us a lot of new problems, but at least widespread parking garage blight isn’t one of them. Shawn Micallef writes weekly about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef