Multi-Story Parking Structure Under Construction, American Downtown, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Multi-Story Parking Structure Under Construction, American Downtown, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Multi-Story Parking Structure Under Construction, American Downtown, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-EEAC9B

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Somewhere in an American city in the 1950s, a multi-story parking garage was rising on a downtown block, and someone considered this worth photographing from the street — which was the correct instinct, because the parking garage was the decade's great civic confidence project. Cities had decided the car had won, and the appropriate response was to build temples to it in reinforced concrete, curved and tiered, right in the middle of downtown where the pedestrian traffic had been. The structure's sweeping arc of open decks, still raw with formwork lumber stacked against unfinished bays, represents the moment before anyone had thought to ask whether tearing out a city block to store automobiles might hollow out the very downtown it was meant to save. A late-1940s or early-1950s American automobile — rounded roof, wide chrome trim — sits in the foreground, parked on the street outside the thing being built to replace streets like this one. The one-way sign on the wall completed the transformation quietly: traffic flow had been rationalised, the old grid reorganised around the car, and everyone involved was certain this was progress.

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