The spread of the car was certainly the driving force for the industrial development of the whole western world. Even the urban growth of the early 1900s took into account, in Europe as well as in the United States, this means of transport that changed the DNA of our cities.
In particular in the USA, the automation system designed by Henry Ford around 1913, led to imagine the use of automation also in the management and parking of cars. How? With elevators. In those years, therefore, they began to design real “hotels for cars” in which the vehicles moved upwards thanks to efficient elevators. The proposal of this type of garage appeared for the first time on “Popular Mechanics” in December 1921: the dream was a completely autonomous car building that worked by itself, without the need for human intervention.
An ambitious project obviously had New York as its location, in particular at the northeast corner of 61st Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan where there was a tall brick skyscraper in Art Deco style. Right here, in fact, stood the mythical Kent Garage one of the two automatic garages that Milton A. Kent had built at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s.
Here the parking attendants took care of the customer’s car and drove it to an elevator that transported it to the designated slot, exactly as some libraries managed, both at the time and today, the archiving of books. The car especially in the United States became an obsession, an object to show as well as to own. As Serhii Chrucky of Forgotten Chicago reported, “contrary to the municipal parking lots built in most of the other North American cities that are often mediocre, Chicago erected modern monuments to the car. Instead of hiding the vehicles behind a classically inspired facade, the Chicago garages put them on display.”
