I’ve been making a study of garages. Maybe that means I have too much time on my hands, but when I got to thinking about it there’s a bit of a time-capsule aspect to it; it gives a glimpse into societal change that has occurred over the lifetime of those in what a friend of mine calls “the twilight years.”
Garages before World War II were used for cars. They were never attached to the house, but usually situated in the backyard and opened on to an alley that ran between the cross streets on the block. A drive through South Roanoke will demonstrate that building type. The single entry was about seven feet wide and would accommodate the small vehicles of that era. Neighborhood boys used garages as clubhouses during the day, and sometimes as restrooms rather than trekking home when the need arose.
An especially interesting relic of that generation can be found on Bellevue Ave just above Carilion Memorial Hospital. The streetcar rails ran just a few feet from the entrance of each garage. I suppose someone had to stand in the street and give a signal to the emerging driver that coast was clear; else every exit would have been a real adventure, streetcar brakes being quite inefficient.
There were virtually no families who had more than one car, but that changed after the war. Wives began to have cars of their own, which brought about another evolution: the attached garage and a driveway to hold the second car. Parking on the street became common and changed the style of play in which children engaged; parental tolerance for baseball-smashed windshields was quite low.
Following the halcyon years of gas at 27.9 cents a gallon, the necessity for two cars became commonplace. A new car would cost less than $2000, but this raised a problem for the garage owner: once you barely get your car into the garage, the driver could not open the door. Soon, garages made a series of transitions. Some were used as storage sheds, some were remodeled into additional household space, and houses were being built to hold both cars. As cars became much larger, the size of the garage had to be increased.
When the children of the postwar period reached age 16, rare indeed was the one who had a personal car. In a high school class of nearly 500, I knew of less than a half dozen who had a car of their own. That began to change in the 1970s. High schools had to build massive student parking lots. Virtually no one walked to school and when school buses became available in the city, the parent’s responsibility for seeing that junior got to school disappeared. Riding the school bus was considered taboo by many of the high schoolers of that era, and teenage car ownership skyrocketed.
Cars became more fuel efficient and much more compact which freed up garage space for other purposes. The principle that nature abhors a vacuum was in full flower as partially empty garages demonstrated a remarkable magnetism for all manner of non-automotive uses. In no time at all there was not enough space for two or even three cars, so the driveways had to be widened or street parking increased.
Now in modern times a family of five may well have four or more cars, and none of them can get in the garage which is filled wall to wall, floor to ceiling with jet skis, boats, campers, mountains of cargo of undetermined types. A ride through an upscale neighborhood will confirm this. Because many suburban streets do not have curbs and are not wide enough for street parking, it is not unusual to see cars parked on the front lawn.
The latest iteration of this phenomenon is the placement of a storage pod in the driveway that opens into a jam-packed garage with multiple cars strewn about the yard as if parachuted from a cargo plane.
The point of all this is that the day will come when the hapless homeowner will have to move to the OFF (Old Folks Farm) and someone will have to figure out what to do with the detritus occupying the garage.
Have we even thought about attics?
Hayden Hollingsworth
