Parking Garage

The great grey walls wind up and down in an endless spiral of concrete parking space. The sound of the tires screeching as they turn round and round is like the afternoon call of birds in this urban jungle cave. You sit in your booth at the exit, and the cycle of cars coming and going keeps the monotony away, but the drivers crying because they lost their parking ticket can be a bit pathetic. A multi-storey car-park, also called a parking garage, is a building designed specifically to be for automobile parking and where there are a number of floors or levels on which parking takes place. The earliest known multi-storey car park was built in 1918 for the Hotel La Salle at 215 West Washington Street in the West Loop area of downtown Chicago, Illinois. It was designed by Holabird and Roche. The Hotel La Salle was demolished in 1976, but the parking structure remained because it had been designated as preliminary landmark status and the structure was located several blocks from the hotel it was built to service. Parking structures are subjected to the heavy and shifting loads of moving vehicles, and must bear the associated physical stresses associated with them. Expansion joints are used between sections not only for thermal expansion, but to accommodate the flexing of the structure's sections due to vehicle traffic. Seismic retrofits can also be applied where earthquakes are an issue. Occasionally, parking structures have partly collapsed, either during construction or even years later. In July 2009 a fourth-floor section failed at the Centergy building in midtown Atlanta, pancaking down and destroying more than 30 vehicles, but injuring no people.