Pigeonhole Parking


219 South Broad Street

Barf. Photo by Viking Squirrel.

               This piece of cowshit is the sickly older brother of last week's Butt-Fugly Building of the Week. Look at this Tower of Titanic-Level Fuck Ups. Browned-up exposed concrete, faded blue shit everywhere, and a big faded sign that never looked good. The worst part is: this shitty parking structure never needed to exist.
                In the 1960's, a city that was never built for cars now had to start accommodating for them like never before. Recently built highways served the city's suburban workforce and they needed somewhere to put those cars while they were at work. On South Broad Street, however, there was plenty of parking. The empty lot left over from the destruction of the Hotel Walton was able to support pretty much all the parking needs of the area, so this Butt-Fugly Building of the Week need not ever exist!!!
              I guess someone thought that the Hotel Walton lot was going to be built over soon (though it wasn't built on until 1983, dumbasses) and in 1968, it was decided that a "pigeonhole" parking lot would be built, and that they would use elevators (!!!) to move the cars up and down it, making it the first (and ugliest) of its kind in the city. They wanted it to look modern, which back then meant putting vertical lines everywhere. Here's the rendering from before it was built:

What the fuck? Picture from Temple U Library, in case you can't see the gigantic watermark.

         Hey, wait a minute!!! That's much better than the design that was actually built!! The tall part of the garage is set back from the street so it's much less noticable, and there appears to be a small building attached that could have been used for retail purposes today! AAARGH!!!
         Look, I knew someone was going to start complaining that the style of the time looked good and that this Pile of Putrescence probably looked nice when it was knew, however, being the big-balled motherfucker that I am, I managed to scrounge up a picture of it's opening day on February 15, 1969:

Still fucked up. Oh, and check out the mangled up Ritz-Carlton/Miguel Corzo Center to the left. Oof. What a horrible time to be a Philaphile that must have been. Once again, read the gigantic watermark.

            Still looks like a piece of garbage. I would advocate knocking this motherfucker down and having it be an Empty Lot of the Week for two years until something decent got built there. Shit, I'd settle for some crappy fake facade cladding like the one at Juniper and Sansom. Anything but this shit. Did anyone involved with this realize where it was and what it would look like? Fuckin' morons.