May the Force Be With You in Parking Garage : ‘Star Wars’ Theme, Other Movie Music Help Drivers Find Their Autos
Admit it. You are always losing your car in garages. Movieland, however, has a sound solution, so listen up.
To help visitors find their way back to their cars, the property manager of a 26-story Century City office building has done away with color-coded floors, numbers and letters.
Instead, each of the four parking levels beneath the Century City North building is named for a movie. A series of speakers in the “Gone With the Wind” level, for example, fills the structure with the haunting strains of “My Own True Love,” also known as “Tara’s Theme.”
Drive down three ramps and you’ll begin hearing the theme from “Star Wars.”
‘Singin’ in the Rain’
In between the “Gone with the Wind” and “Star Wars” levels, parkers can hear “Singin’ in the Rain” on the level of the same name and both “Over the Rainbow” and “We’re Off to See the Wizard” on the “Wizard of Oz” level.
“Everybody seems to be parking all the way down on the D-level where nobody used to park because that’s where we have the ‘Star Wars’ theme,” said Frank Coari, vice president and Western states marketing director for JMB Property, the company that manages the building.
The Century City building is the third office building in the country to feature musically coded parking garages.
The concept was developed by Myron Warshauer, who heads the Chicago-based Standard Parking Corp. For his idea, Warshauer earned the Institutional and Municipal Parking Congress award for excellence in innovation in a parking operations or program.
JMB, also of Chicago, licensed the concept and offers music-to-find-your-car-by in its properties in Seattle and Chicago.
The Seattle garage features music related to different cities. Coari said movie themes were selected for the Century City building because many of its tenants are entertainment-related companies.
‘Bunch of Happy Parkers’
“We have a bunch of happy parkers now,” Coari said. “Where we had some lost parkers or frowning parkers, now we have some smiling parkers and that makes us happy.”
Coari said the program, which was unveiled earlier this month, cost about $317,000, including about $215,000 for graphics and directional signs, $98,000 for paint and $4,000 for movie posters and rights to the themes.
“We thought what we would have to do in this building would have to be meaningful and useful to the tenants,” he said.
And considerate. Coari said a parking annex used by the building’s permanent tenants is coded by movie posters only, so that they do not have to hear the same song every day before going into work.
The music in the 1,843-car garage is provided by Muzak.
Coari conceded that not being able to find your parked car is not always a major problem facing most business people on their way to or from meetings.
“I think everybody’s done it at least once or twice,” he said. “It’s probably not the worst problem we have, but it’s one little problem that hopefully we can overcome.”
