"... the car in motion ... the car at rest ..." (Jakle and Scully 1)

These three pictures of downtown Calhoun, Georgia, approximately 70 miles north of Atlanta on I-75, reveal a mosaic of small town elements reminiscent of turn-of-the-century uses of the downtown, urban elements often associated with the CBD, and the tropes of parking culture which can be found wherever cars are found. A striking occurrence, or rather an absence, also implicitly argued by these photos is that the town chooses vehicles over its inhabitants.

The first picture, "Downtown Calhoun, from atop parking garage," shows from this vantage a variety of parking options and signage associated with parking. Parallel parking and angled parking are both available on this one-way street. Yellow curbs, which developed as early as the 1930s (Jakle and Scully 31), denote no parking zones as does the diagonally-striped yellow space behind the pick-up truck. In the background, more angled parking can be seen on Wall Street, the "Main" street. In the distance (upper center portion of the photo) is Court Street, which has angled parking on both sides of the street as well as traffic moving both directions in the center. This city, displaying banners proclaiming it a "Main Street City," is currently renovating many of its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings, like the Gem Theater and the recently transformed Rooker Hotel into the Harris Arts Center, while trying to attract such businesses as diners, cafes, and antique shops. However, at five p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, seventeen vehicles outnumber the lone pedestrian.

The second picture, "Downtown Calhoun, interior parking garage," portrays the ground level of the single parking garage in Calhoun. The slightly ominous, urban feel (dark, enclosed, tunnel-like) of this ubiquitous parking structure is ironic, as this is the only interior space of the entire structure; parking in this downtown is mostly curbside (open, seemingly spacious). This structure is adjacent to the Courthouse and County Jail and provides parking for municipal employees and those accessing municipal services; at just past five p.m., the structure is mostly vacant. Even though this is a fairly small space, the pillars, slots, arrows, and receding perspective create the impression of a larger, more urban parking space with its automobile-dense need for space. The structure is built into a hill with entrance/exit for the open-deck at that level and entrance/exit for the interior on the lower level. Most cities built their parking structures by the 1920s (Jakle and Scully 115); Calhoun's was built in the last five years. While not needing features such as speedy entrances/exits, ramps, space, and tight engineering/design, it borrows aesthetics of the modernist parking structure.

The third picture, "Downtown Calhoun, looking at parking garage," shows the one-way street in front of the garage, a portion of Piedmont Street from which the garage is accessed, and a portion of Wall (Main) Street. Wall Street is a major intersection, and the signage in the picture, similar to what Banham discusses in regard to much larger Los Angeles, is an important element of this downtown and its location on the Old Dixie Highway from Chattanooga to Atlanta (now US 41). The traffic is foregrounded in this picture, with the police car taking center stage in this area of the city that, essentially, now privileges municipal vehicles and employees. The wideness of the one-way street, as Jakle and Scully discuss (35), reveals a transformed Calhoun in which downtown space was deeded to parking, with the ensuing eroding of cultural spaces. The park that ran parallel to Wall Street remains only in the name of the present-day road: Park Street.

These pictures are representative of "parking as a commonplace of everyday life" (Jakle and Scully 16) in which the meaning of this downtown is a juxtaposition of centuries, technologies, architecture, and vehicles which have generally supplanted people. This combination of urban elements, ubiquitous parking tropes such as signage and color symbolism, and the retention of a "small" downtown reveals the ways in which "the car in motion [and] the car at rest" are part and parcel of every space in which vehicles must be parked and driven, even at the expense of the people who use and restore this place.