Manhattan’s last parking meter is history
Photo:Courtesy DOT
Kemraj Bowani, of the city's Department Of Transportation, used a jackhammer to remove the last parking meter in Manhattan.
By Nathaniel Herz September 21, 2011
For New York City’s parking meters, Monday was a time for change.
No, not nickels and dimes. This was the end of an era.
Just after noon in Harlem, a small crowd of people gathered to watch as meter number 101-0655 was picked apart, assaulted by jackhammer, extricated from the sidewalk, and finally dumped unceremoniously into the back of a yellow Department of Transportation truck.
No. 101-0655 was Manhattan’s very last working single-space parking meter, those founts of frustration for New York City motorists. Its eviction from a nondescript block on Frederick Douglass Boulevard was a big step for the city’s DOT, but there’s a long way to go: the 43,000 remaining in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx.
“We still got four more boroughs,” said Kemraj Bowani, the yellow-vested DOT worker who operated the jackhammer. “So we’re not done.”
The decommissioned single-space meters are being replaced by what the DOT calls “muni-meters,” the solar-powered, computerized consoles that cost more than $4,000 apiece, and which, according to the New York Times, have been sprouting up around the city since 1996.
The new machines speak foreign languages—including Spanish, Italian, and Russian—accept credit cards, and can handle multiple parking spaces at once, making it easier for attendants to collect money. They even have Wi-Fi connections.
“There are a lot of advantages of the multi-space meter, ” said Carrie Krasnow, an expert at Walker Parking Consultants in Manhattan who has worked on parking studies in Santa Fe and Los Angeles. “It’s more flexible.”
But for the city to make the switch, there’s still a lot of work ahead for DOT staff like Bowani.
On Monday, he said that he and a co-worker have been working to uproot some 40 single-space meters a day for the last five months. Four other DOT crews do the same work elsewhere in the city, according to Glenn Hagen, Bowani’s supervisor.
Bowani said he was just glad that Monday’s meter removal was a straightforward job—thin concrete to punch through, and a lightweight, non-reinforced pipe holding the meter up.
“This was an easy one,” he said.
New York may be pushing parking’s cutting edge now, but the city was actually a late adopter of the single-space meters.
Invented by Carl Magee, a former newspaper editor in Oklahoma who played a role in exposing the Teapot Dome scandal, the meters were first used in 1935 in Oklahoma City.
Over the next few years, New York City residents and the state’s legislature hotly debated using them, with pro-meter merchants associations pitted against automobile owners, one of whom derided the devices at a public hearing as “a combination of an alarm clock and a slot machine” used for “further socking the motorist, who is already paying enough in taxes,” according to a report in the Times in 1937.
As New York stood its ground, neighboring Newark adopted parking meters in 1942, and a few years later, so had some of the villages in Long Island.
Finally, in a ceremony on Sept. 19, 1951, attended by both Mayor Joseph Sharkey and champion boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, New York’s very first single-space parking meters were christened on 125th Street in Harlem—just a few blocks from where the last one was retired this week.
A borrowed dime inserted by Sharkey was the first coin swallowed; it bought him an hour’s worth of parking time.
Today, that dime is only worth six minutes, as prices have since increased to $1 per hour in most areas. Except in some parts of Manhattan, those costs will not change with the introduction of the muni-meters.
The transition away from the single-space machines in all five boroughs is supposed to be finished by next June, according to the DOT.
Dennis Sullivan, 44, who was parking his Honda Civic on 120th Street on Tuesday evening, said he liked the muni-meters, since they are “more efficient.” As for the single-space meters? He won’t miss them very much.
“I don’t know if we’re going to get nostalgic over parking meters,” he said. “If that’s the case, we can put them in an MTA museum.”
In addition to the installation of the muni-meters, the DOT is also conducting pilot programs of a new parking pricing system—one that can charge customers as much as twice the normal rate during peak hours.
The system, known as “variable-rate parking,” is lauded by urban planners, and is being explored in other cities around the country like Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco.
Other new parking technologies, like text messages that direct drivers to empty parking garages, and systems that allow payment by cellular phone, have yet to appear in New York. But Krasnow, the parking consultant, said the city is still adapting at a good pace.
“Considering how huge New York City’s parking system is, they’re certainly on the progressive end,” she said.
Back on Frederick Douglass Boulevard on Monday, progress was visible when Bowani and his partner filled the old parking meter’s former hole with freshly mixed cement, while 10 yards away, a sleek muni-meter kept watch over the cars on the block.
The whole operation was over in about 20 minutes, and then it was back to Queens for lunch. But Bowani said that the lifting and lugging of the 80-pound meters still takes its toll.
“My back hurts—I can tell you that much,” he said.
