The Cynic Express(ed) 2.18: Parking Up the Wrong Tree

     I was standing outside the super-duper cineplex in West County the other evening, looking out into the unseasonably warm February evening from underneath the brim of my black fedora. As I gazed out over the aquarium of cars, multi-hued like angelfish and other denizens of the tropical reefs, I recognized one more true calling that I am glad did not have my phone number. As I awaited fate, or at least the other half dozen people coming to see the new super-duper cinematic achievement of Mel Gibson, I knew I would have flunked out of the Parking Lot Designer Institute.

     After all, in America the free, brave, and home of foolish occupations like tax preparer, title researcher, and telemarketing fund-raiser, we have earned a low unemployment rate by creating goofy occupations that I am sure had -saurus appended to the end of them just before the dinosaurs died off. And somewhere in the shuffle, someone’s got to be spending many late nights over architect tables designing elaborate and landscaped parking lots like that great groundwater repellent outside of the West Olive 16 in the Heritage Center. I’d never have made it that far.

     You see, I would be too involved with the function of the parking lot and not so excited about the form or the auto-exoticism involved with the development of strip-malls-that-are-not-strip-malls (they bend and twist, so they are not STRIP malls, get it?) and parking-lots-that-are-the-hanging-gardens-of-Babylon-in-their-spare-time. I would look at an area, and determine that the most efficient way to lay it out is a nice grid of parking spaces surrounding the cinema. I’d make my mark for convenience and aestheticism by putting number and letters on the plentiful light posts. After all, it’s a parking lot.

     My professor at the William K. Shlamenkins Institute Of Retail Automotive Repose Design would have pulled me aside and encouraged me to go into a dishonest racket like punditry.

     After all, Shlamenkins Institute graduates, or wherever they come from, design things like the parking lot at the Heritage Center (Yes, kids, this is our heritage, our gift to you: acres of asphalt around shop-front dentists and small upscale bagelries).

     I, the simple-minded inartistic non-designer that I am, see little mazes of parking spots separated by islands. I see a vehicular flow that curves and turns every twenty feet. I see, as part of the innate Evil in mankind after the Fall, the tendency to park near anything resembling a curb as though it’s a city street. Never mind that it leaves room for a moped between the clever parker’s car and the more traditional, in-a-parking-spot parker’s car. Clever parker has parked and is now enjoying a romantic comedy inside--if you were clever, too, you would be, it’s not his fault that you’re not. I also see a lot of wasted space in the "green space" created by the islands, as if by adding this "green space," the shopping center remembers Earth Day and environmentalism and is actually creating wildlife habitat for a couple of earthworms.

     In this green space of these islands, the parking lot designer (or C.V.C., certifiable vehicular coordinator) planted tasteful shrubbery. He’s added small hedges designed to relax the retail shopper who would be otherwise stressed out by the seemingly arbitrary and frequently ignored stop signs. After all the retail shopper-driver will be stressed out--I always am--because these gramm bushes are in the way and I cannot see what is coming when I turn. And there’s nothing like shrubs to break up the line of sight and add shadows to a dark and nearly deserted parking lot when you’ve gotten off of work at midnight. Of course, I am not worried--this Cynic, in aforementioned fedora and unaforementioned black trench coat, tends to out-sinister everything around him. But I have a fiancee who works in a bend-and-curve mall. But I guess the CVC thinks he knows better than I do that no miscreants lurk in Ladue or Creve Coeur. Or hopes better than I do.

     It’s not all that mono-foilagamatic, though. The CVC has also put oxygen-breathing (and hence life-giving) trees into these islands as well. A neat concept. A home for eventual birds that will twitter and sing, giving the shoppers music to listen to while they walk a quarter of a mile to their cars. Of course, I do not see that big picture. The big picture I see shows me the scene in twenty-five years, when the trees, planted ten feet apart in islands about four feet wide, have destroyed the asphalt of the parking lot and will need to be cut down. Not to mention the bird droppings on the cars from the little twitterers. Probably the CVC realizes that the owners of the land will need to build to suit before then, and the expendable trees can be razed like buildings when they need to expand the parking lot for the new Aldi.

     One more reason for me to give thanks that I have a lucrative English degree and no need to return to school to support myself by creating asphalt and yellow paint meccas that, with the addition of green space and narrow traffic lanes, represent the small town public plazas that I somehow don’t remember.