In my most recent column, “Parking Madness,” I skewer the practice so prevalant in Virginia of surrounding every mall, shopping center, office park, church, government facility and even recreational amenity with vast, expansive parking lots. Suburbia has paved way too much of its surface area with impermeable, run off-creating asphalt, and it has destroyed any memorable sense of “place” by treating its buildings as islands in seas of gray pavement. Gone are the urban streetscapes, which utilize parking spaces to help define pedestrian-friendly places where people enjoy spending time.
There was one issue in that column, however, that I dealt with only in passing. In an auto-centric society, there aren’t enough curbside parking spaces to accommodate everyone with a car. Where do you put the extra parking spaces? How do you avoid ruining pedestrian-friendly streetscapes?
If you’re in a neighborhood defined by city blocks, put the parking behind the buildings. That’s the solution adopted by Richmond’s “Libbie and Grove” shopping area mentioned in the column, but a solution only imperfectly adopted. The parking lot behind the shops and Westhampton movie theater preserves the streetscape along Grove Ave., but abuts Libbie Ave. for a lengthy stretch, creating an eyesore for the shops on the other side of the street there.
The best execution of this idea that I’ve seen can be found in downtown Staunton, where the parking lot is consigned to the center of the block and intrudes only minimally on the streetscape. The photos at the top and bottom of this post, which I took last fall during a weekend visit to the Blackfriar’s theater, show the interior of a block in the heart of downtown. Placing parking in the middle of the block preserves the integrity of the streetscapes, creating the charming pedestrian ambience for which Staunton is reknowned. The interior parking lot serves a bed-and-breakfast hotel, the Dining Room (one of the greatest restaurants I’ve ever dined in… anywhere), stores, boutiques and professional offices. A similar parking-in-the-center-of-the-block configuration can be found at the Woodrow Wilson birthplace museum.
This configuration is possible, of course, only in urban areas organized in grid-street patterns. If anyone has seen it adapted successfully to the surburban pod pattern of development, I would love to hear about it.