I’m sure she means well.
Every hamlet in America has one; A semi-retired grassroots organizer who self-promotes their way into a leadership role in fighting back the monster of tall buildings in order to preserve the town’s rural character. It’s a cultural equivalent of greenwashing, in that somehow by building structures no more than two stories tall onto formally agricultural land that must be travelled by car, we can save a way of life where people cheerfully greet their neighbors while walking to work. Carson City was built for walking, but here just as in any American city, any proposal for living not to the benefit of four-wheeled road vehicles is viciously condemned by those unsympathetic to the mere discussion of alternative.
It’s a formula that breeds political opportunity for a very specific type of leader riding on the lie of zero-sum development: Claiming that replacing surface-level parking lots with new buildings and opportunities will suck the charm right out of an otherwise serene and happy place. Many a community organizer, in no way excluding our very own, has a proclivity for saving the most toxic venom for any and all proposed parking garages.
But Carson City has always had parking garages. Some of our lost historical architectural treasures were parking garages. In a town laid out in 1859 with walkability in mind, the blocks could only be 200 feet long, with the expectation that buildings could rise from their lots as high as the brick walls could carry them. The parking garage was essential for boarding horses and wagons upon arriving into town, because what, leave your team outside exposed to the elements? Nay.
If I’ve lost you up to this point, you’re forgiven. Parking garages were known at the time as livery stables. They were unnecessarily beautiful for their utility, being built often of timber but in at least one case built of masonry to the same standard as the state capitol building across the street. The garage made for parking was even a thing to have as part of the home to protect one’s investment, including the horse, and later without the horse. The garage is an expression of pride in the thing it has been built to house, be it a wagon and its complement of horses, an automobile, a few fire engines, or a fleet of eleven locomotives pointed eastward waiting at attention in their sandstone stalls.
Those with only enough imagination to conjure up the worst of what something could be see only glass and concrete when thinking of a new piece of the neighborhood, though in fairness, we have a long history of replacing good architecture with terrible architecture. Replacing great architecture with no architecture. Replacing our civic story with parking. Replacing whole neighborhoods with asphalt. At some point one has to decide that these were all choices, and that the death of an urban core was a death of a thousand good-intentioned cuts by well-meaning community activists who think they’re helping.
Any structure, be it a lighthouse, a goat shed, a hotel, or a parking garage, has an opportunity to be breathtaking or hideous. Carson City needs parking garages, because without them, we must fill the entire Eagle Valley with surface-level parking and four-lane arterial roads to reach them. And all in the name of preserving the view of the mountains? Because of the way we waste the land, there will be nowhere else to go but into the mountains. How great will the view be then!? If nature is to be a part of our urban landscape, then the trees are sacred. Big trees, small trees, old, new, full and spindly, are absolutely critical to the walkable city. Abraham Curry and his co-founders knew this, but every day it seems our beloved cottonwoods, elms and maples they planted themselves are cut down. Probably to protect the view of the mountains.
Carson City deserves more than to be literally pushed down by the limits of imagination. Rising from this urban forest that protects the streets from the punishment of the summer sun should be buildings that perform their utility with the beauty that the city they serve can be proud of, made from the Nevada stone and lumber of the earth we walk on, and with the techniques and craftsmanship passed down to us by our forebears. But that comes down to us.
— Samuel Flakus is Vice-Chair Carson City Cultural Commission and Former Board-Member Downtown 20/20 Group
