It's a fair bet that no one has ever been wed in an underground parking garage.
Everywhere else, sure, everywhere from city hall to rain forest to ice castle to the most desolate desert but no one, either in their right or not quite right mind, would ever choose an underground parking lot for their nuptials. That's because underground parking garages are among the most reviled places on earth, and because underground parking is now so costly a wedding held in a subterranean lot would likely be the most expensive in history.
You know, people talk a lot of smack about Satan, but at least Lucifer doesn't make you buy a ticket when you enter hell. Not so for those poor unfortunates who must seek shelter for their automobiles underground.
How did such a simple idea – if we put cars underground they won't be in the way above ground – go so wrong? Wrong, it seems, virtually from inception. Except for a brief moment in the early 1950s, there has never been a golden age of underground parking.
All depictions in art and cinema are negative. There are no romantic comedies that end with two lovers embracing and kissing in a glittering underground parking garage. No, these cavernous lots are dangerous. Are you a murderer or aspiring murderer in need of a place to shoot someone or run someone over with your Camaro? Look no further than the underground parking garage. Want to leak secrets to Washington Post reporters ( All the President's Men)? Book a space at your local sub terrestrial lot to have a meeting. Or maybe you're vigilante police officers ( Magnum Force) and you don't like Clint Eastwood's haircut. Or maybe you're Ryan O'Neal ( The Driver) and you answer the question, "How do we know you're that good?" by taking a Mercedes on a hypogean joyride and demolishing it. No matter. The underground garage is your one-stop home for nefarious activities.
While the cinema's portrayal of underground garages is grim, the reality is worse and can be divided into two categories: underground garages built before the 1980s and those built afterward. The earlier versions are mysterious, a little like the gigantic stone heads found on Easter Island. They were constructed in the era of oversized gas-guzzling behemoths and yet they can barely accommodate today's compacts. How did drivers in 1976 park down there?
You know instantly when you've been trapped in one – the lights are dim and menacing and the interior is reminiscent of the decor one might have found in Hitler's bunker, circa 1945. By this time it's too late to turn back. The architecture defies any basic common sense. The driver finds himself trying to navigate a square layout. There is no room to manoeuvre and these lots are invariably pocked with columns stuck in the most inconvenient places. You can estimate the age of the garage by counting the paint marks on these columns, kind of the way you can tell the age of a tree by counting the rings. On some, there are so many scrapes it looks as if some pop-art graffiti artist has painted an enormous bar code. Sad reminders of dents long past.
While old underground lots were badly designed and inhospitable, at least leaving them was pretty straightforward: you gave the condemned soul working in the unheated booth some cash and he gave you some change and you drove away.
By contrast, garages built in the last 20 years are well-built fleecing machines. Once you've passed under the "$11.50/half hour. No Daily Maximum. All hope abandon ye who enter here" sign, traffic is generally run through circular thoroughfares that transport the unhappy motorist deeper and deeper into the seemingly limitless depths. "Hey, look dad, we're on P7, there's Alexander the Great immersed up to his eyebrows in a river of boiling blood and fire!"
Numbers, colours and animals are used to demarcate each level, but no matter – you can try to remember that you are parked on 7L Purple Turtle North West as much as you want, you will still get lost, a wanderer searching for his car in a vast deep abyss of automobiles.
When a driver wishes to exit the premises, it's time to play that favourite parking garage game, "How Do I Pay These People?"
Did you bring the ticket with you? Is it one of those lots where you pay at a well-hidden parking kiosk or is it a lot where you have to pay a living (or electronic) gate keeper? Maybe you must use a credit card to pay? The possibilities are endless and as certain as the fact that you will get stuck for 15 minutes behind someone who forgot to do any of those things and will require an attendant to leave his perch on P3 Tiger Green South Central to personally help them pay.
It's a hellish cycle and a form of modern contrapasso – the punishment fitting the crime. We drivers crave mobility and yet find so often we find ourselves stuck in claustrophobic underground mazes. Dante would be proud.
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