National Building Museum holds exhibit on parking garages

To you, a parking garage is a place to stash your car for a few hours. To the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., it could be a symbol of architectural genius – or a source for artistic inspiration.

Some of Southern California’s iconic garages are part of a new exhibit at the museum.

It’s the open-air parking lot that seems quintessentially Southern Californian.

But Sarah Leavitt, curator at the National Building Museum, says even before there were parking lots, there were parking garages.

"Pretty much all early automobiles would have to been in garages," she says. "As soon as there were cars, there had to be garages." Even in Southern California.

The National Building Museum usually spotlights architectural features like windows or decorative terra cota tiles. Sarah Leavitt says this is the first time it’s highlighted something most people hardly notice – parking garages.

Early on, she says, stables were converted to house automobiles. But they weren’t big enough. The first multi-story parking garages showed up in Paris and New York at the turn of the 20th century.

By the 1920s, Californians owned more cars per capita than anywhere else in the nation.

In 1927, a 12-story office building opened in downtown L.A. with a flashy ad campaign: “Locate your business in the path of progress,” it says. “The Roosevelt Building in downtown Los Angeles at Seventh and Flower.”

In the drawing on display, you can see that the cars are parked on the below floors of the office building. It’s an advertisement that was trying to attract businesses to come locate there because they had parking.

The Roosevelt Building has been turned into luxury lofts that sell for more than half a million dollars – and “valet parking” is listed as one of the amenities.

A few blocks away is another classic parking garage featured in the museum exhibit: the multi-level lot beneath Pershing Square. Sarah Leavitt says the garage was part of a 1928 architectural plan by S. Charles Lee, but it wasn’t built for a quarter century. It’s supposedly strong enough to survive an atomic blast. In fact, it's a combination underground parking garage and bomb shelter.

Leavitt says a lot of garages actually in the 1950s were also bomb shelters. It was one way of getting federal funding during the Cold War for the construction project. "Kind of the stimulus funds of the '50s and '60s," she says.

Parking garages found their way into American culture – especially onscreen. In the 1961 film West Side Story, the Jets street gang works out its aggression in a dance inside a dark garage lit by the headlights of parked cars.

A dark parking garage plays a role in All The President’s Men. It’s where Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward character meets his anonymous source “Deep Throat.”

So what is it about parking garages and movies? Leavitt says they're sometimes a scary place, a place people don’t purposely spend a lot of time. Plus, she says, "it’s probably an easy location for directors to find. They’re certainly ubiquitous."

Some of the best architects have lent their talents to parking garages. One that Frank Lloyd Wright designed became his inspiration for the Guggenheim Museum. The original garage at Santa Monica Place was designed by Frank Gehry.

Sarah Leavitt from the National Building Museum says most 20th century architects designed garages. "Garages are part of any building," she says. "If you design an office building, or a museum, or a public building, you design a garage to go with it."

In Culver City, architect Eric Owen Moss turned that concept on its head. He created a parking garage that appears to have given birth to glass and metal offices that spill out of its center. Moss calls it the Pterodactyl. And it’s also featured in the exhibit.

“House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage” is on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC until mid-July.