A modern descendant of the Park-O-Mat, the Volkswagen CarTowers, stacks cars in the Autostadt theme park, in Wolfsburg, Germany. *
Photo: Christian Charisius / Corbis * 1951: The first Park-O-Mat parking garage opens in Washington, D.C.
Operated by Parking Services Inc., this unique garage had no ramps, aisles or lanes. Instead, two 16-story elevators were deployed to store up to 72 automobiles. It was simplicity itself, requiring a single attendant and taking up very little space (a 25-by-40-foot lot did the trick).
Cars were retrieved in under a minute using an early version of a "vehicle parking apparatus." It's basically a revolving elevator into which the cars are driven and stored.
The attendant, who retrieves the car by operating the elevator from ground level, never steps inside the vehicle.
The Park-O-Mat bespeaks an era, the postwar boom years in America when automation was the rage. Automats, or automated cafeterias, were popular, and it was also the time when laundromats, still a fixture in the urban landscape, appeared on the scene.
While the original Park-O-Mat was a fairly short-lived phenomenon, the more sophisticated automated parking garage is enjoying something of a renaissance in U.S. cities where parking is tight (i.e., practically all of them).
(Source: Today in Science History)
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