A Guide to Some Municipal Parking Garages

8th 4th Street Meeting Parking Deck

The county-famous Meeting Parking Deck is designed for anyone with a need to have a meeting today. Gate attendants are constantly keeping track of which spaces are free and which people have not yet met anyone, and a roving pack of feral docents guides visitors into teams where they can hold meetings or — using the cylindrical tower at the north-east corner of the structure — even start to facilitate networking or some such rot. This parking deck leads the way in the whole Lesser Pompous Lakes Area as being the fourth-largest small-business incubating parking deck and counts dozens of small-business success stories to its credit by stealing the mail from the Lastman’s Glurge Small Business Development Center and Discount Candle Emporium. Maximum parking fee of $18.50 per day which can be waived with proof that you know someone who died of boredom during a Total Quality Management seminar.

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Lower Riverside Parking Structure

This much-loved garage was designed in the mid-70s when everyone expected the population explosion and the over-densification of cities to force everyone into vast underground superstructures. This 14,000-vacancy lot burrows deep underground, beneath the riverbed and beneath the never-planned Second Avenue Incomplete Subway tunnel, features a broad-arched ceiling and reasonable security against peeping satellites. Unfortunately an oversight in the zoning permits made the access tunnel only twenty feet wide and vertical. After several months of repeated plummeting incidents the modern system in which the car is packed in a giant pneumatic tube canister was put into place, and the process of dropping off and retrieving cars became a lot more fun.

Open 6 am through 1 am. Entrance on Flood Street, just past the grease trucks, underneath the tent that says “Not The Parking Garage” which is there for a good reason having to do with the neighbors complaining about the old car retrieval system, which was an electromagnetic launcher up the tunnel.

In the area be sure to admire what the city has dubbed the Monument to Steel, gardens of vertically-stacked late 70s automobiles crashed and residing on the tops of neighboring buildings and also the middle of the 4th 6th Street former pedestrian overpass.

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404 Service’s Avenue

This garage, famed for its small yet steady crowd of nerds coming to take photographs of its address sign, shows off the novel architectural concepts of a team that really should have known better. Among the featured innovations are wholly separate spirals for ascending and for descending cars, and no known way to get from one spiral to the other. Cars are allowed to rest on a parking space array strongly reminiscent of backgammon boards but of even more inscrutable playing rules until such time as they idle-out and are cleaned out of memory by the vast supercomputer on which our universe is a mere and weird-running simulation, at least if the hypothesis about our living in a vast supercomputer simulation of a universe pans out. (So far all the interim reports have gone missing.) If it doesn’t then teams of specially trained raccoons are standing by to lick every available hubcap. The training was reportedly quite intense.

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Rollo Street Municipal Parking Garage

This garage, located in the scenic outskirts of the Pompous Lake Greater Municipal area, baffles traditional expectations of what a parking garage should be in such matters as location and general parkability. While the fees are a very pleasant $0.50 per hour, with a $1.25 per day cap, or $2.50 per day if the gate attendant thinks you’re asking for trouble. Its location a mere twelve miles away from any office buildings or downtown shopping ensures this spacious facility is never short of empty spaces, and the bus running every two hours into town has abundant room for more people.

The architectural style struggles to blend the soaring geometric curves of Art Deco with the powerful lines of Brutalism, but gives in to temptation and is mostly a bunch of concrete turning a little moldy with age. Each level is helpfully denoted with red stripes so that people can find their way back to every level before actually getting to their cars. Open 24 hours a day, and doubly open three of those hours.

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