Parking Garage of the Week-- May 9th

Interpark Parking Garage

1327 Locust Street

Craptonious.

                   This parking garage is a disgrace for numerous reasons. Its ugly, its big, its in a location that should have something better, and it replaced a goddamn Furness masterpiece. This is shit!!!
                 You read it right... this shitbird parking garage replaced one of Furness' greatest structures, his version of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Completed in 1880, it was a Megacastle of Librarian Cockcurls that graced the corner of Juniper and Locust for 60 years while the neighborhood was known as Library Row.

Imperial Fortress of Chancellor Kickass in 1899. Pic from the PAB.

                     In the 1930's, the Library Company was hurting for cash. They begrudgingly built their new HQ at 900 South Broad and everyone hated it. The organization started to go broke from lack of membership and gross mismanagement of finances. The Librarian of the period was an Englishman named Austin Gray. This dumbass barely knew what could be found in the library's collection and thought publishing a badly written history of the organization would garner support and raise funds. The idea failed.
                      In 1940, the money problems grew exponentially. Gray's new bright idea would get two birds stoned at once... knock down the money-draining but awesome Furness library and install a money-making surface parking lot.

The surface lot in 1948.

                   The lot became the third Luckless Lot of Library Row and was a smashing success. The Library Company had a Percentage Lease deal with the lot operator, so they collected a rent that was proportional to the lot's profits, which were HUGE. In 1949, profits were so good that the Library Company decided to build a massive parking garage on the site that could hold 541 cars. This, then, is the birth of this awful parking garage.
                  By 1952, the parking garage had paid for itself and the Library Company had more money than it could handle. A new Librarian who quit the Rosenbach, Edwin Wolf, took over Library Company and revamped the fuck out of it using the newly acquired riches. Eventually, they sold off the parking garage.

The garage is visible in the center of this image from 1959.

                     For six decades, the shitbird-ass mega-garage would continue to operate, all the way to here in the present. It has stood three years longer than the Furness Library Company building did. The lights in the word "PARK" out front barely work and the rear is a bum bathroom. Being that the facade was recently painted beige, it appears that this giant piece of dung is not going anywhere. The current owner, a Delaware-based company with a Scottsdale, Arizona address, bought the garage in May of 2000 for $10 and has been sitting on it ever since.
                    What a shitty garage. The location is zoned C-5, so a fucking skyscraper could go here if the owner had the balls to sell-off this parking goldmine to a developer with a Scrotum of Steel. I remember seeing a plan where this shitgarage and the Pigeonhole Parking building would be demolished and replaced with a skyscraper, but that was probably just a fantasy. One day, this 63 year old parking garage will meet its fucking maker and we'll get a nice building here. Don't get your fucking hopes up. 

Its just keeps going and going and going. I'd rather have a Furness.