On Fri, 20 Nov 1998, Lawrence Kestenbaum wrote:

> Of course, some applications would seem to call for a more precise
> calibration.  A multistory parking structure might have "speed limit 5
> mph" posted -- this I have seen many times -- but it's hard to imagine
> someone driving all the way up to the roof (or all the way down) while
> continuously observing the 5 mph limit.  Quite possibly it has never been
> done in the entire history of the building.

I'll reply to my own message, and ramble on a bit on the subject of
multistory parking structures, a building type a bit neglected by
architectural historians and the preservation community.  (If the subject
doesn't interest you, delete now!)

Perhaps because these are not often discussed in the national media, the
terminology varies from one region to another.  Here in Michigan, such a
building would be naturally called a "parking ramp".  Other places call
them "parking structures" or "garages".  In Canada, they are called
"parkades".

I have recently changed jobs from Michigan State University to the
University of Michigan.  Since we already live in Ann Arbor, this is a
dramatic reduction in the distance of my commute, from 65 miles to about a
mile and a half.  Nonetheless, given all the constraints of life in the
1990s with two careers and a baby, I still usually drive to work.

Both at MSU and at U-M, one may purchase through payroll deduction a
university staff parking permit.  And in both places, I could park in the
ramp (local terminology for multistory parking structure) across the
street.

The folklore in Michigan is that parking structures do not last long
because of road salt.  Michigan is both a huge producer and a huge
consumer of salt for deicing roads.  Obviously this salt gets picked up in
slush and tracked into parking structures, where it drips through and
corrodes the building materials it comes in contact with.

East Lansing has a 1970s-vintage parking ramp in its downtown which will
probably soon be demolished; a private sector owner would have given up
years earlier.  Other large parking structures have been torn down in Ann
Arbor and Lansing that I know of.

I'm a bit sad about losing the East Lansing ramp because it is a specially
designed and very successful building, with nice modern brickwork, display
spaces, a bridge to a nearby department store over a very nicely done
alley space (they called it the "Alle" back in the 1970s).

In the 1980s, when East Lansing again built a parking ramp, and the
problems with the earlier ramp were already apparent, it was thought
perhaps that parking ramp design was a very demanding architectural
specialty, like hospital design or freeway interchange design, and the
city hired a firm that did cookie-cutter copies of the same parking ramp
on different sites all over the Midwest.

Those of us who had politically supported the bond issue for the 1980s
ramp were appalled at its banal design.  It would have been easier to
swallow if it didn't have the screen of decorator concrete units arcoss
the front.  "East Lansing can do better than this," I and others raged.

Little did we know that the city council was listening.  In the 1990s,
when the city again approached the problem of parking ramp construction,
the architect was given some severe constraints.  "No brick!" they said.
They wanted something Different, something Unique, something Festive, and
they got it: a confection of convex ribbed steel in shades of various
vivid colors (think of the Pompidou Center) that was immediately dubbed
the Habitrail or the Gerbil Cage.  Nobody liked it at first, but it has
really grown on me, as all eccentric buildings evenually do.  The sheet
metal facades have stood up far better than skeptics predicted; and the
ground-floor retail spaces, which sat vacant for the first few years, are
now full of thriving businesses.

The $12 million in revenue bonds the city sold to build the Habitrail were
bought by none other than my old high school friends, the Arnold brothers,
a couple of tinkerers who (instead of going to college) built an empire of
pinball machines and video games, and collected their now considerable
wealth almost entirely in quarters.  More recently, Tim Arnold (who as
"Sloucho Barx" also has a syndicated cable TV show) has opened a private
museum of pinball near Las Vegas.

Anyway, a big reason for the problems with parking structures is the
neglect of maintenance.  The Downtown Development Authority in Ann Arbor
recently disclosed that the Ann-Ashley parking structure was "supposed" to
be waterproofed three yars after construction; it's now 12 years and it
hasn't been done.  Ann Arbor's mayor in the 1950s, Bill Brown, was famed
for his contention that once the parking ramp was built and paid off, the
parking spaces were free, i.e., no maintenance was needed.  Now Ann Arbor
is busy trying to reverse Bill Brown's legacy of neglect on its municipal
parking structures.

MSU and U-M have avoided this problem by assiduous attention to the
maintenance schedules, and their parking structures are in remarkably good
shape.  At MSU, the parking structure near my office was closed for a week
every midsummer for resurfacing.

Just in the last few days, U-M has been working on the elevator lobbies in
the parking structure where my car spends its weekdays.  The lobbies are
inside the elevator tower, but with large openings toward the parking
area, meaning that they are unheated and completely open to outside air.
Apparently those openings used to have glass doors and windows.  Now the
university is putting new glass doors and windows to re-enclose the
elevator lobbies.

The elevator tower is built of concrete block sheathed in brown brick, and
with typical U-M attention to detail, the short walls that are being added
(below the sills of what will be the window sections) are being done in
brown brick matched to the existing.  This morning, I stopped to chat with
a bricklayer and praise the work, and we discussed the job including how
difficult it was to get the right color of brick, and that the color of
the mortar joints has more visual impact than most people realize.  He was
startled that I seemed to know so much about this, and asked if I lived in
a brick house.

I told him a couple of Ken's anecdotes about working on buildings in
Manhattan, where falling masonry units would land on the roofs of parked
Jaguars eight stories below.

                                Larry Kestenbaum