Atlanta’s First Parking Deck
Decatur Metro | June 13, 2010Did you know that downtown Atlanta’s very first parking deck, the one that was destined to sire dozens of off-spring, still stands tall and proud along Peachtree Center Avenue?
A great post on Pecanne Log reports that the “Ivy Street Garage” opened to the public with 600 glorious parking spaces on June 3, 1925 and was deemed “one of the sites of Atlanta.”
But good ol’ granddad ain’t housing the “most comfortable parking you’ve ever known” anymore. Nowadays it hosts chemistry labs and lecture halls. And if you attempted to drive a car up it’s painted ramps today, you’d send hundreds of GSU students fleeing.
Yep, according to the Log, Atlanta’s oldest parking deck is GSU’s Kell Hall.
Click over to Pecanne Log for some old timey pics and more info!
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It makes for quite an uncomfortable building. And the irony–to get from floor to floor you walk up and down ramps (designed for cars) and yet they are too steep for wheelchairs. I believe this is the next building slated for demo at GSU (but they’ve been saying that for years).
I can tell you from being at GSU that they have no plans to immediately demolish the building. We’re talking at least a decade or more down the road (if at all). With the new science center, all sorts of space is being freed up in Kell, which means that they’re putting in new teaching labs and classrooms in there to maximize every square foot of campus. Kell is so solidly built and is buttressed by at least one building (which may depend on Kell to help hold it up) that it wouldn’t be demolished — it would have to be deconstructed.
Yep, when I have visitors to GSU, I like to show them Kell, just for the weirdness factor. It’s fun walking up the wraparound wide rampways (too steep for wheelchairs) going from floor to floor, and to see all of the HVAC equipment bolted to the outside of the building, probably because the thick concrete inside prevented the tubing from being snaked along the inside as it normally would be.
That said, Kell has really atrocious classrooms.
Not that I know anything about it, but I’ve heard that once or twice, someone might have accidentally taken a late night ride in the Kell ramps on office chairs. All in the name of physics research, I assure you.
oh, let us not fail to mention it’s absurdly tiny elevators and awkward classrooms. and yet, i really did enjoy that building.
There is a tiny post office in the building as well! Would have loved to have been on one of those office chairs–eeek!
I totally forgot about that until I read this. I had a cultural anthropology class in Kell Hall and remember how weird that building was, and apparently still is!
That sounds like a weird subject !