City Parking Garages

Parking places What should a parking garage look like? In Chicago, the issue is anything but academic. By Blair Kamin Tribune architecture critic Published December 28, 2004 Every day, millions of Americans do something that has a profound but little-noticed impact on the fragile texture of cities: They drive into a parking garage. As they head up a ramp, the tension builds: "Will my car get dented? How will I find the elevator? Will that Chevy racing down the aisle run me over?" But there is greater reason for concern: Like all buildings, a parking garage can either bring vitality to a city or suck the energy right out of it. There is, of course, the eyesore garage we all know and despise, the three-dimensional cash station for the garage owner that assaults passersby with crumbling concrete and stark fluorescent lights. Yet there also are parking garages with ground-floor shops that enliven sidewalks, and facades that acknowledge that people look at garages as well as drive into them. Some of them, such as the circular garages that form a pedestal for the corncob-shaped towers of Marina City, even manage to be beautiful. All of that raises a simple but extremely thorny question: What should a parking garage look like? In Chicago, the issue is anything but academic because Mayor Richard M. Daley and his planners have declared war on parking garages that look like parking garages. Instead, they are to be brick-and-mortar chameleons, blending in with everything from Lakeview houses to Loop office buildings. Daley also wants the harsh surfaces of parking garages to be softened with hanging baskets, flower boxes, roof gardens and other greenery. Daley's plan "will go a long way in the ongoing beautification and improvement of our central area," city officials trumpeted after the City Council passed the mayor's garage landscaping ordinance last year. But a close look at Chicago's new garages reveals an outcome that is far more complex, or just plain silly. The new ones tend to be a strange, stage-set hybrid -- buildings for storing cars that pretend to be buildings where people live and work. Many of them have an eerie look, like a house where everyone has pulled down the window shades and never plans on coming out. Almost comically, the plants that adorn some of the garages are doing what outdoor plants in Chicago typically do in December: They're dying. Which is why the mayor's plan, hyped as the latest step in his "greening of Chicago," is really more "the weeding of Chicago." It's a beautification fiat carried to extremes, Daley's Martha Stewartizing run amok. At first glance, the words "distinguished design" and "garage" would seem to go together as well as "Cubs" and "pennant-winning." Garages are not built for the ages. They are the ultimate capitalist tools, machines that make the land pay. But Chicago has somehow become a showcase of good garages. They range from the Self-Park at 60 E. Lake St., which architect Stanley Tigerman endowed with a whimsical facade that resembles a Rolls-Royce grille, to the Wabash-Randolph Self-Park next to Marshall Field's State Street store, which architect Lucien Lagrange shaped to complement the muscular Chicago School buildings of the Loop. And the city's vaunted ability to elevate construction into art continues at the under-construction 111 S. Wacker office building, where architect Jim Goettsch has turned the underside of a parking ramp into a spectacular piece of sculpture that sweeps through the building's lobby. So why the fakery? Perhaps because city officials are writing rules that deal with the lowest common denominator of design, punishing the best architects for the sins of the worst. What is happening in Chicago has implications for cities throughout the region and the nation. Evanston, for example, is allowing the construction of sizable garages at the base of the new condominium towers that are transforming its downtown. And car-oriented, Sun Belt cities such as Houston have for decades permitted towering multistory garages in their downtowns. For them, as well as Chicago, the issue of whether a parking garage should wear a disguise has major implications for how the cities of the 21st Century will look and work. If you want to understand the anatomy and the aesthetics of a parking garage, then let Gordon Prussian show you around. Prussian, 81, is the chairman and self-described "chief curmudgeon" of General Parking, a Chicago real estate partnership that owns all or part of about a dozen downtown garages. He wears a dark green hat that matches the shade of his BMW 745i and the stylish logo that adorns the company's garages and those of Chicago-based InterPark, which bought General Parking's operating arm in 1997. You've undoubtedly seen that logo if you've cruised the Loop: a white "P" on a field of green with a downward-pointing arrow. To drive with Prussian is to slip through a looking glass and enter a new world in which downtown Chicago's world-renowned architecture fades into the background and its ever-growing number parking garages, typically ignored, come center stage. Counting garages and surface lots, there are more than 100,000 parking spaces available to the public in Chicago's central area, an increase of at least 15,000 spaces since 1991. Prussian begins at one of the structures targeted by Daley's beautification edict -- the South Loop Garage, a 750-space, 12-story garage built in the 1980s at 318 S. Federal St. It's directly across Federal from the Monadnock Building, a chocolate-brown, turn-of-the-last-century skyscraper that is a staple of architecture tours. With walls of exposed concrete and an interior that's open to the elements, the architecture of the South Loop Garage is charitably described as "functionalist." Prussian drives his BMW up the ramp, ticking off features as he goes along: The underside of the concrete ceilings is painted white to make the inside of the garage seem safer and brighter. Floors are labeled by theme and the elevator lobbies offer "pull-outs," little pieces of paper, to remind forgetful drivers where they parked. The elevators are near buildings that generate traffic -- in this case, the Union League Club on Jackson Boulevard rather than the Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center on Van Buren Street. "We don't get much business from there," Prussian says of the jail. Like most downtown garages, this one has parking spaces that are 8 1/2 feet wide as opposed to 9 feet wide in a suburban mall, where the extra 6 inches are added to enable families to load kids and bags in cars. Like airplanes with tightly packed seats, the closely spaced city garages allow operators to cram in more cars and generate more profit. But the South Loop Garage's most important feature can only be glimpsed when you stand back and take in the whole thing: It's big. It sprawls across half of its block, measuring roughly 100 feet from east to west and 220 feet from north to south. Chicagoans take beefcake garages like that for granted, but such girth is unheard of in, say, Manhattan, where hyperexpensive land values dictate the construction of skyscrapers and other uses that generate considerably more income than garages do. A typical Manhattan garage is about half the width of its counterpart in Chicago, Prussian explains. That difference -- think of it as the deep-dish garage versus the thin-crust garage -- has major consequences for urban design. The tiny Manhattan garages, which must be operated by attendants skilled at squeezing cars into itsy-bitsy spaces, can fade into the woodwork of New York's skyscrapers. But Chicago's long-span garages, which are so spacious that drivers can park the cars themselves, are frequently as tall as skyscrapers. The tallest free-standing downtown garage, at the corner of Lake and Wells Streets, rises 15 stories, or six stories taller than the first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Office Building, which was completed in Chicago in 1885. (Parking garages usually don't exceed 12 stories because drivers will only tolerate five or six 360-degree revolutions, each carrying them two stories higher, before they get to the roof, according to Pier Panicali, a vice president at the Chicago office of Desman Associates, a parking garage design specialist.) Even the garages at the bottom of the city's condominium high-rises can soar as high as a 10-story building. And it was those garages, in particular, that got City Hall's attention in the late 1990s. Lacking glass or grilles that would mask parked cars from passersby, these vehicle warehouses brought blight to new heights, such as the one at the One Superior Place apartment tower, which was designed by Loewenberg + Associates, a firm responsible for many of River North's hulking high-rises. In response to a public outcry over these monsters, the City Council in 1999 passed a measure that encouraged developers to screen the interiors of their garages from passersby. Then, last year, at Daley's behest, the council approved new landscaping requirements for both new and existing downtown garages as part of the mayor's push to overhaul Chicago's outdated zoning ordinance. By April 1, 2007, the law states, the owner of every existing, multistory non-residential parking garage in downtown Chicago must submit a landscape plan to the city's Department of Planning and Development. The plan must spell out how the owner will screen at least half of a garage's openings with such things as hanging baskets or flower boxes. Rooftop gardens, another mayoral favorite, are encouraged. Once the landscape plan is approved, the owner will have six months to get the greenery in place. Owners of new free-standing garages must screen sloping floors so they can't be seen from nearby sidewalks. Openings above the second floor must use glass, screening panels or other elements "that make the parking structure more architecturally compatible with surrounding buildings," the city ordinance states. The law is equally strict on so-called "accessory" garages, which are typically found at the base of high-rises. They are to be judged, the city says, on the degree to which they blend in with the building they serve. If you guessed that these requirements promise to make it more expensive for people such as Gordon Prussian to build parking garages, you would be right. Figuring in the cost of sprinklers and air-handling systems, which are a must in enclosed garages, his son Michael, General Parking's president, estimates the premium at 20 percent. Unless parking operators work differently from other businesses, some of those increases are bound to be passed on to consumers, who already are paying rates such as $26 a day to store their cars downtown. There is a price, in other words, for garage beautification. The question is: Is the reality of dolled-up garages as good as the city's rhetoric? True, the new garages represent an improvement over the old eyesores, but that's setting the bar pretty low. If you can't afford tickets to Second City and need a good laugh, then try the landscaped garages and their foliage follies. Take the big garage at the base of the Millennium Centre, a residential tower at Dearborn and Ontario Streets designed by Solomon Cordwell Buenz of Chicago. While the garage handsomely complements the Art Deco Revival skyscraper that soars above it, the five levels of planter boxes hanging from its facade are a sad joke. Maybe they looked nice in August, but this being December, the plants in them are sickly and bedraggled. Parking customers occasionally use the boxes as impromptu garbage cans. "It probably looked really good on the rendering," laughed Denise Casalino, commissioner of the city's Department of Planning and Development, when a visitor showed her a snapshot of one dreary planter box. There's a lesson here for Daley: Plants in the sky need lots of TLC, especially when they're bathed in noxious fumes coming out of tailpipes. To garage operators, maintaining the plants almost surely is a low priority. Which raises the specter that Daley's plan will produce hanging weeds instead of hanging gardens. So why not just do away with the requirements for hanging baskets and flower boxes, especially because they threaten to gussy up the clean lines of the city's better existing garages? Another problem with the city's rules: They're giving us ghost garages, such as the one at the Farralon, 600 N. Dearborn St., another Loewenberg + Associates condo high-rise. Instead of openings that reveal the cars inside, the Farralon's garage has translucent panes of glass that shield the garage from the street. That sounds good, but the outcome trades the blight of ugliness for the blight of lifeless uniformity. All the glass panes look the same -- a deadly white. There are no voyeuristic views of couples kissing or even office workers poring over their computers. All the random, chaotic energy of the city seems squelched. Multiply this effect by two and you get a sense of the banality that has been inflicted on the cityscape by such large-scale concealed garages as the one at the North Pier Apartment Tower, 474 N. Lake Shore Drive, by Dubin, Dubin & Moutoussamy. As the skyscraper butts up against the Drive, the louvers disguising its garage have all the charm of a nuclear power plant. The new garage beautification law wisely suggests eliminating such eyesores. While louvers and other screens offer practical benefits -- they block the wind and keep snow from piling up on cars along a garage's perimeter -- they have drawbacks, too. Completely screening a garage's interior means no one on the sidewalk can watch the people inside. Passersby cannot play the crime-deterring role of "eyes on the street," the phrase that the urbanologist Jane Jacobs coined for the way city neighborhoods police themselves. But for every rule about ugly parking garages, there is a contradiction, a sparkling exception that makes crafting effective design mandates extremely difficult. If a complete camouflage job sounds like a bad idea, based on such duds as the North Pier garage, then consider the mighty, X-braced John Hancock Center. The parking on its lower floors is deftly hidden behind windows that fool you into thinking there are offices behind them. But that subterfuge is perfectly acceptable. Any openings would disturb the pure geometry of the great truncated obelisk. Even so, it's hard to be persuaded by the well-meaning but lackluster stage-set architecture of the free-standing garages that respond to the city's garage beautification drive: the 2-year-old Mart Parc Wells garage at 401 N. Wells St., which apes the Art Deco architecture of the nearby Merchandise Mart; the Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center garage, open since May, which mimics nearby townhouses along Wellington Avenue; and the Government Center Self-Park at 181 N. Clark St., just two months old, which tries to blend into the Loop but winds up resembling a banal, suburban-style office building. At the hospital garage, by RTKL architects and Desman Associates, the pretense is carried out to lengths that are practically Disneyesque. The big garage pretends to be small, with brick walls that echo the scale of nearby houses, metal grids that suggest windowpanes, and extra-wide planter boxes. The visual cues tell you that someone lives inside, but, of course, this is a place that only cars call home. Form follows fakery, not the building's underlying structure, as at the Hancock. The only thing missing is an actress in period costume who comes out and waters the shivering plants. For all it respects its neighborhood, the garage still rubs the wrong way in a town that has long valued honesty of expression. Which brings us to the garages that work: They work because they follow the principle of stylized honesty. At Lagrange's 14-year-old Wabash-Randolph Self-Park, vertical green pipes endow typical garage openings with a layered, three-part look that recalls the rhythms of Chicago's turn-of-the-century office buildings. The street-level facade has stylish flat columns and shops that enliven the sidewalk. Mechanical equipment is concealed in stylish mini-temples on the roof. Yet there is no attempt to hide the fact that this is a garage. Rather, in the best Chicago tradition, the design takes the facts of the building and transforms them into straightforward, workaday beauty, like a carpenter wearing neatly-pressed overalls. Wabash-Randolph is hardly an isolated example. Solomon Cordwell Buenz's five-year-old Rush-Ontario-Wabash Garage is a visual knockout because it has a perforated metal screen that expresses the diagonals of its sloping ramps. The same goes for Ralph Johnson's sleek new Contemporaine condo high-rise at 516 N. Wells St., which showcases the diagonal ramps within its base. And at 111 S. Wacker, Goettsch takes the garage to a whole new level, making the most of a ramp that leads from street level to a multistory garage within the office building. The underside of the ramp swoops through the glassy lobby, its ascent marked by a stepped plaster soffit and fluorescent accent lights. The soffit and the lights dematerialize the heaviness of the concrete ramp, making it seem as weightless as a Japanese fan. This extraordinary visual drama is wrought from the most ordinary facts of everyday life. Can we have a little more honesty, then? Can we have some garages that aren't afraid to be themselves? Bright people in the planning department, including Sam Assefa, the new deputy commissioner for urban design, recognize that the long-term solution to the "necessary evil" of the parking garage is to attack the core of the problem rather than the symptom. It is to make the garages disappear, or at least shrink, by encouraging more people to take buses and trains to work. (Currently, according to the Metropolitan Planning Council, about two-thirds of downtown workers take public transit while the rest drive.) Wisely, the law offers developers "density bonuses" that hold out the carrot of more square footage if they put garages underground. But Chicago's high water table and often-squishy soil tend to make underground garages extremely expensive. So for now, at least, the big aboveground parking garages aren't going away. And step one is one for the mayor and his planners to acknowledge that garages can be attractive additions to the cityscape by artfully expressing what they really are. Tacking on flower boxes and false fronts isn't the answer. Why homogenize the city when its glory is the chock-a-block intensity of its often-clashing uses? The best strategy for the garages is to extend and expand the Chicago tradition of bold, honest architecture rather than going down the road of well-intentioned fakery. That's something to think about the next time you drive up the parking ramp. - - - Great (and not-so-great) moments in the history of Chicago parking garages -- an architectural guide - 1918 -- Chicago's first multistory parking garage, the Hotel LaSalle Garage, made its debut at 215 W. Washington St. With a brick and terra cotta facade by architects Holabird & Roche, the garage had an innovative interior that combined a ramp and elevator for efficiently moving cars. It's still operating today. -1926 -- The eclectic Jewelers Building let security-conscious jewelers drive into the skyscraper from lower Wacker Drive. Then elevators would take their cars to assigned parking stalls on the first 22 floors. Because of mechanical failures and the growing size of cars, the system was dropped in 1940. The garage floors were turned into offices. - 1929 -- Architect M. Louis Kroman took the Art Deco celebration of the car into high gear at the Ritz 55th Garage at 1525 E. 55th St. He festooned its terra cotta facade with every automotive image imaginable: steering wheels, stoplights, tires, gearshifts and a sleek, open-air roadster. - 1933 -- The Nash Tower at the Century of Progress world's fair used an elevator to showcase the latest models of the now-defunct carmaker. The tower's sleek see-through design also demonstrated the space-saving advantages of mechanical car storage. - 1955 -- With car ownership soaring after the Depression and World War II, Chicago built numerous down-town parking garages, most of them utilitarian eyesores. This one, constructed at 11 W. Wacker Drive, was dubbed the "bird-cage." - 1962 -- Rising where Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler's Schiller Building and its Garrick Theater once stood, the Garrick Garage at 60 W. Randolph St. artlessly mimicked the destroyed masterpiece with the ornamental patterns of its concrete grille. - 1967 -- Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City showed how the words "concrete garage" and "stunningly beautiful" don't have to be mutually exclusive. The complex's circular parking floors formed a delicate, airy base for the corncob-shaped residential towers. - 1969 -- Its elegantly severe geometry reflecting the high-water mark of postwar modernism, the Madison-Franklin Parking Facility by Chicago architects Schipporeit-Heinrich won a Distinguished Building Award from the American Institute of Architects. It was torn down to make way for an office building. - 1973 -- The world's busiest airport got what was, when built, the world's biggest parking garage. Designed by C.F. Murphy Associates of Chicago, the 9,266-space garage at O'Hare International Airport has 79 acres of parking that sprawl over six levels. - 1986 -- Postmodern whimsy came to the parking garage in the Self-Park at 60 E. Lake St., designed by Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman. The hilariously clever facade resembles an oversize Rolls-Royce front with such details as a shiny grille, hood ornament, faux headlights and awnings that look like tire treads. - 1999 -- Demonstrating how late 20th Century architects were as fascinated by dynamic, diagonal forms as 1930s architects were with streamlining, the Rush-Ohio-Wabash Self-Park by Chicago architects Solomon Cordwell Buenz flaunted a deliberately off-kilter aluminum grid that expresses the angle of the garage's ramps. - 2004 -- Reflecting Mayor Richard M. Daley's desire to make buildings in Chicago more sensitive to the environment, the roofs of new parking garages are being planted with greenery. At the new Government Center Self-Park at 181 North Clark St., part of the roof is covered with plastic tubs filled with dirt and plants.>