Over the years, cities and towns have demolished grand old structures to make way for garages and surface parking. The result was an asphalt kudzu that has strangled other parts of civic and economic life. Yet Gruen had validated the postwar belief that cities had a parking shortage they desperately needed to fix. Gruen’s proposal was never executed Texas legislators rejected a necessary bill.
Early blight on tomatoes in new area plus#
Grabar notes that in a “fan letter” (her term) to Gruen, Jacobs gushed that the Fort Worth plan would bring back “downtowns for the people.” An off-street parking spot, plus the room necessary to maneuver in and out of it, requires more than 300 square feet-about two-thirds the size of a typical new studio apartment. “Gruen was telling downtown Fort Worth to build more parking than downtown Los Angeles, a city seven times its size,” Grabar writes, and “in a city that, with its wide, cattle-friendly streets, was already an easy place to drive.” Yet at the time, not even Jane Jacobs-the now-sainted author of the urbanist bible The Death and Life of Great American Cities-appreciated the dangers lurking in plans like Gruen’s. He wanted to shoehorn so many additional parking spaces into the urban core-60,000 in all-that visitors would never have to walk more than two and a half minutes back to their car. In 1956, at the invitation of a top business leader in Fort Worth, Texas, he proposed a pedestrian-only downtown surrounded by a freeway loop and served by massive new parking garages.
The Vienna-born architect Victor Gruen, best known as the father of the shopping mall, came up with a solution: Preserve urban vitality by making more room for vehicle storage-a lot more room. Local notables saw this obstacle course as one more threat to cities that were beginning to lose businesses and middle-class residents to the growing suburbs.
Early blight on tomatoes in new area drivers#
In the decades before World War II, as car ownership surged in the U.S., drivers in downtown urban areas simply parked curbside-or double- or triple-parked-leaving streetcar operators and fellow drivers to navigate around their vacant vehicles. Parking was once the stuff of sweeping urban visions. For decades, even as rents spiraled and climate change worsened, the ubiquity and banality of parking spaces discouraged anyone from noticing their social impact. This misplaced priority has put the country in a bind. All those 9-foot-by-18-foot rectangles of asphalt haven’t only damaged the environment or doomed once-cherished architectural styles the demand for more parking has also impeded the crucial social goal of housing affordability. That Americans like driving is hardly news, but Grabar, who takes his title from a Joni Mitchell song, says he isn’t quibbling with cars his complaint is about parking-or, more to the point, about everything we have sacrificed for it.
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