Lisa Gray

Garages tell Houston’s story

Columnist and member of the Editorial Board, Houston Chronicle, Jan 25, 10.

Tagged with transportation, houston, land use, cars, parking

Aerial photos of Houston from the ‘80s — even photos of the most tightly packed parts of the city, of downtown and the Medical Center and the area near the Galleria — show oceans of asphalt. Parking lots everywhere.

From the air, the east side of downtown was a patchwork of blacktop, an ugly flat expanse suddenly interrupted by skyscrapers. Those parking lots rarely had attendants; at something resembling an apartment building’s bank of mailboxes, you stuffed folded dollar bills into the slot whose number matched your parking spot. Then, to get to your downtown destination, you crossed the asphalt desert, blazing hot in the summer, going straight from ground-level parking to buildings so high you that had to crane your neck to see their tops. As both a land use and a landscape, those lots made no sense at all.

Most of those lots succumbed to our last building boom, a long, slow one in which the city changed underneath us. And one of the biggest, subtlest changes was this: More and more often now, we park in garages.

Ugly garages. Gorgeous garages. Above ground and underground. Garages that match their buildings. Garages that are part of their buildings. Garages that stand on their own. Garages that, generally, we don’t pay much attention to.

Even the best of them is never your real destination, only part of the journey. And because we’re so used to free parking, paying to park in a garage bugs us. It feels like being charged to breathe.

But garages are worth thinking about. Maybe more than any other kind of building, they show the city that we’re becoming: a city that’s growing up in a different way than the old-style cities of Europe and the East Coast. Instead of starting out with a tight-packed core and then sprawling, we started out sprawling, and are now developing tight-packed cores.

We’re squeezing more people into less space — and at least for now, garages allow us to do that without giving up our cars…

Full story: Garages tell city’s story.
Source: Houston Chronicle, January 22, 2010

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