That’s a Lot of Cars : They’ve Got to Park Somewhere, and Therein Lies a Tale of One City

It was in 1917, so the story goes, that an Italian immigrant named Andrew Pansini observed a pedestrian gesturing wildly at drivers in downtown Los Angeles.

The man, who was sane, was offering to guard cars parked on the street--for a small fee, of course.

Pansini figured the principle was sound, but not the methodology. He bought property on the corner of 4th and Olive streets and put up a sign advertising the same service for a flat 5 cents a day, perhaps the town’s first such business.

The citizenry didn’t embrace paid parking right away, possibly because Pansini didn’t validate.

“He didn’t get a customer for two weeks,” said David Pansini, his grandson, who runs the family parking business in San Francisco.

But things picked up. From the handful of spots available on Pansini’s dirt, the number of off-street parking spaces downtown has been increasing ever since--to about 125,000 now.

At the same time, many of the open-air pioneer lots like Pansini’s (now the property of Pacific Bell) have disappeared, replaced by office buildings and other structures with multilevel subterranean parking.

Gone is the landmark auto park at 1326 W. 7th St., opened by Jack Hazard in 1921 on the grounds of his service station. So many truckers had asked if they could leave their rigs there overnight that Hazard decided he might as well make a business of it. It’s now a liquor store.

Gone is the lot at 451 S. Flower St., founded in 1923 by Israel Silberman, a Christmas tree salesman looking for some way to earn money off his land the other 11 months of the year. It was swallowed by the Bonaventure Hotel.

Gone soon will be the asphalt at the 124 Weller St. lot in Little Tokyo. The Community Redevelopment Agency wants to build there. It was a blacksmith shop when founder Alexander MacCaw bought it in 1927 and started charging a daring 15 cents a day for parking, recalled his son-in-law, Bob Templeton, now a vice president with Grant Parking. “It’s been in my family ever since,” Templeton said wistfully.

Pansini (Savoy Auto Parks), Hazard (System) and Silberman (Allied) all expanded to the point where their companies flourish today but, still, no plaques adorn the sites of those first lots. The closest thing to a historic marker is the “Since 1929” sign that Grant Parking hangs over its properties, a true only-in-Los-Angeles touch.

Of course, this is an industry that by its own admission is unloved, having inspired zany screen characters ranging from Kookie, the narcissistic tire-screecher in television’s “77 Sunset Strip,” to the eerie attendant who joy-rides a classic sports car in the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

“People don’t realize how professional we are these days,” Pansini said.

“We provide an important service, but we’re often a scapegoat” for the unattractiveness of central cities, added Stanley Long, president of the Parking Assn. of California.

As evidence, consider the Joni Mitchell song lyric, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” inspired by the demolition of the Garden of Allah apartments, a Hollywood landmark.

The truth is, they didn’t put up a parking lot; they put up a bank.

Long admits that some criticism is warranted. Over breakfast at the Biltmore, which has an unhampered view of the Pershing Square parking garage, he recalled the time he left his Rolls-Royce with an attendant at a Hollywood restaurant, “and when I came out, there were six Rolls all parked in the street--with their keys in the ignition! The attendant had no idea whether it was my car as I got in. No wonder there are GTAs (grand-theft auto infractions). . . .”

Pansini’s daughter is writing his biography, but little else has been written about the pioneer parking lots.

For instance, historians can identify the longest-operating restaurant (Cole’s, 1908), office building (Bradbury, 1893) and department store (Bullocks Wilshire, 1929) in Los Angeles, but no one knows which parking lot has been in business the longest, where, perhaps, Rudolph Valentino might have set foot after alighting from a limousine. (No doubt the lot would have been repaved since then, but still, memories. . . .)

George Ullman, president of Grant Parking, believes that the self-service lot his company handles behind Musso and Frank’s Grill in Hollywood may be No. 1 in seniority.

“It (the lot) has been there as long as Musso’s (since 1919),” said Ullman, whose company owns or operates 100 auto parks.

Most stories about Musso’s point out that it has achieved almost legendary status as the one-time gathering place of such writers as William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West, not to mention actors from Charlie Chaplin forward.

And who never gets any credit? The parking lot attendants.

“One reason for Musso’s success is that it’s always had convenient parking,” Ullman pointed out. “Seventy-five percent of the customers come off the lot.”

Musso’s lot has spanned the three epochs of parking-lot history: the dirt, the rock-and-oil and the asphalt periods.”

Israel Silberman’s son Robert, chairman of the board of Allied, remembers when the first company lot was covered with asphalt in 1939. “We got it graded and paved in one day,” said Silberman, whose company leases, owns or manages about 100 lots. “Imagine doing that today. The roller was a converted Studebaker.”

After asphalt came such industry innovations as painted lanes (impractical in the dirt era), Allied’s post-war khaki attendants’ uniforms (“They were kind of militaristic,” Silberman said), steel spikes (as in “Do Not Back Up. . . .”) in the late 1950s and fare-clocks and stamped tickets in the 1960s (which tended to reduce fist-fights between attendants and customers over how long the car had been parked). Hydraulic car stacking never caught on.

As for parking techniques, attendants were known for offbeat practices as far back as the 1920s, although tire-screeching was comparatively rare in the dirt-surface days.

“If a lot was full,” Cameron said, “the attendants might push a car across the street to a lot on the other side--I mean, push it and watch it roll across the street.”

Parking jockeys of today don’t know how easy they have it, the old-timers say.

“All those big Lincolns and Packards,” groaned Ullman, who drove his way up from the bottom of the company in the late 1940s. “And there was no power steering. You went home tired.”

The 1950s were the era of gadgety cars, testing the memory of any attendant.

“The Studebaker’s starter was under the clutch pedal,” Steve McNamara, system vice president, recalled, shaking his head. “One Buick, you had to step down on the gas pedal to start. Some cars had transmission buttons in the center of the steering column. Some had button starters. . . .”

Not only are the cars of today easier to handle and more uniform in their operation, they’re also easier to tell apart.

And, thus, along with most of the pioneer lots, the standard parking joke of the early days has disappeared, too, the one about the woman who returns to pick up her car, and the attendant asks her what kind she’s driving.

“The black one,” she says.