If there is a single form that insults us the most, I’d say it’s the parking lot. It is that storage area that is formless, yet vast. While invisible, it is highly intrusive. It has been with us for over half a century, yet we can't recall how it came about, or exactly where it came from, or who thought of it first. It just showed up. It just placed itself on the scene, naturally. Like a bad seed, it fixed itself to the landscape. We had no idea that it would be with us for so long, what felt like forever. We had no idea that it would take on such a large role.
How did it get here?
Maybe it came with an excess of land. I can imagine the first parking lot as an open farm field for a Fourth of July bonfire. Or maybe, it was that other open field next to the state fair. Perhaps there was a church meeting on a plateau in Wyoming. Or maybe it came at some semi-open flatland, in a field of scattered Southern Pines, for some vile or clandestine gathering. However, my gut tells me that it came with special events.
Those special events then stretched out into destination points. That final destination point that required the car to make its way through the dirt road to the general store, the cornfield, the swimming hole, the town meeting, or some other benign or insidious event. Any open flat field on the side of the road will do. Land is cheap.
Habits then developed. Things expanded and the parking lot was born.
It was innocuous. We had no idea what we had created. But by then the bad seed merged, morphed, crawled on its belly, into the city fabric. It taught some cities hopelessness. There was no sense of place.***
We are past that point now. Cities have become too important to accommodate such cheap storage space for the automobile. This is not just a great advancement in the development of urban living but in the spatial quality of the life that we live in.
The theater of the vulgar has now moved to the suburbs.
***Please refer to Stan Freeberg's the United States of America, for an insightful view on this subject.