The Dignity of Place

The Michigan Theatre
Built in 1926, this glorious building functioned as a performance space until 1976, when it was converted into a parking garage.


This photo and caption from Time Magazine discloses many of the ideas I ruminate on The Franklin Monologues: parking is king; failure to provide for and maintain viable public realms; evisceration of our national manufacturing base; private cars vs. alternative modes of travel; and failure to respect the dignity of place.

Free parking in downtown Detroit! Sorry -- parking is never free...it comes with substantial hidden costs that are rarely revealed to and rarely directly levied upon our motoring public. It most certainly costs less to house vehicles in a dilapidated shell of a former [public] venue, yes...but hardly free.

When I decry the loss of manufacturing jobs, take note that I'm an electrical engineer who works in the support of the manufacturing of electricity. I not only lament the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs but by practical necessity many engineering jobs that support that production are also lost -- all the engineers designing robotic controls in manufacturing facilities, civil engineers designing factories, etc. I don't know much about global economic theory but my gut feeling tells me that our service/financial sector and consumer economy can't be sustained without a productive floor. With the loss of manufacturing jobs, Detroit workers and their families failed to attend theatre anymore. A parking lot it became.

In your city, if your city happens to have a pre-automotive central core, perhaps you've also witnessed that when an old building was at the end of its life it was often razed to the ground and paved over for parking. The lot below might just become a surface parking lot:


If the original building stood with other buildings in a coherent, walkable downtown core, the creation of a parking lot would destroy the street enclosure, destroy the connectivity of buildings. These aren't trivial things, because once you start going down that road the rest of the core is compromised. When you further consider that the property taxes paid by the lot owner are likely less due to it being undeveloped, and that better economics arise from building suburban sprawl instead of infill projects, the core turns to liquid shit.

The core deteriorates while the first suburban ring approaches the end of its newness and a second suburban ring is built, then a third. Property wealth migrates farther out. Look at my Sacramento region -- sure, we are finally recognizing the substantial potential of our downtown core, but the real property wealth has migrated out, to Elk Grove, to El Dorado Hills, to Folsom, to Lincoln, while the earlier inner rings of Del Paso Heights, Carmichael, Valley Hi, Orangevale and Fair Oaks are going the way of the Michigan Theatre...perhaps not quite so dramatically, but nonetheless they are going.