Richardson Street Parking Garage

Free parking!
Came downtown Saturday and couldn’t find street parking so we parked in this garage. The garage is clean and does not smell (rare for parking garages). The elevator is slow as molasses, about 4 minute wait. Cannot beat free parking!
This place is positioned in the heart of downtown Greenville and is in the middle of the shops.

You have to wonder at the power of the atom, the miracle of sand, ground stone, and water to join together like bands of iron for all the ages and rise out of the earth like some hulking colossus. The common municipal parking garage – how simple, how supremely useful, yet how underappreciated it is. It is a giant Matchbox car garage, a shoe box, a hotel where weary cars sleep. The wandering ramps wend their way up and down in a maze that mimics the rest of society in miniature, busy like ants in a nest, uppings, spiralings, and downings, intricate woven patterns like snow flakes, perhaps not so meaningless when seen from a cosmic distance. Ice cubes in the jungle. They don’t appear by themselves. Something arose and put them there. Can a cement structure be separate from a society that produces it? You see the stories of a thousand lives here. The young couple in love on their way to dinner, holding hands. A family going to a ball game. A child negotiating the stairs. Someone’s car won’t start. A couple is arguing. «You threw your wedding ring on the ground! That’s the symbol of our marriage, Bob. What am I supposed to think?» Public space gives the illusion of privacy, but like the empty walls of the garage, you can see through them and be seen, only thinking you’re alone. All structure is artificial, slowly decaying, atom by atom, until it rests, dilapidated, like some vine-​covered wreck at the end of Logan’s Run.