


The result was chaos. Employees of downtown businesses hogged spaces for whole days; some merchants deliberately parked their cars in front of competitors' stores. Other drivers circled the narrow streets waiting for a rare free space. Trucks loading or unloading double-parked. In most cities, there were no marks on curbs to delineate spaces. In the few timed spaces, enforcement by chalking the tires was easy to beat. And the art of parallel parking was in its infancy.

"None of our cities were designed for motor traffic, and only in the West were they young enough when the automobile arrived en masse to adapt themselves to the new traffic medium," wrote Arthur Pound in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1938.

For drivers, downtown bottlenecks were maddening, but for retail businesses that depended on customer turnover, they were ruinous. Some large cities tried banning all parking on a few major thoroughfares, but many shoppers wouldn't walk even a few blocks from their car to a store. They took their business to the periphery of the city.

In 1932, the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce decided it had to do something about the city's downtown parking problem. A local newspaper editor, Carl Magee, was charged with finding a solution. Mr. Magee invented the park-o-meter.

The nation's first parking meters -- crude, single-coin machines that charged a nickel an hour -- were installed in Oklahoma City in July 1935. Public opinion ranged from mockery to indignation. One day, two couples set up a folding table and four chairs in a parking space, deposited a nickel in the meter and played a rubber of bridge.

But many drivers believed that charging for parking was downright un-American. The "newfangled nuisances," "damn foolish contraptions" or "gypometers," opponents said, illegally infringed on the individual's right to free use of the public streets. They amounted to a tax on automobiles, depriving owners of their property without due process.


There was little legal precedent for cities trying to tax parking, although in 1812, an English coachman was indicted for allowing his carriages to remain an unreasonable amount of time in a public street. "Every unauthorized obstruction of a highway to the annoyance of the King's subjects is a nuisance," the court ruled. "The King's Highway is not to be used as a stable yard."

In Oklahoma City, a local lawyer quickly filed a legal challenge to the meters and obtained a temporary restraining order. Eventually, Oklahoma courts ruled the meters legal, but in 1937, the Alabama Supreme Court declared Birmingham's parking meters to be an unauthorized exercise of the city's taxing power, and ordered them removed. Other state courts allowed parking meters, but only if their primary purpose was to regulate traffic, not to raise revenue, a distinction that quickly faded in the lean days of the Depression.

Mr. Magee, already a wealthy man before his invention, was an unlikely parking consultant. As a crusading newspaper editor and lawyer in New Mexico in the 1920s, he had been instrumental in exposing the Teapot Dome oil scandal, which resulted in Albert B. Fall, then secretary of the interior, going to jail. Mr. Magee also did a series of reports on corruption in New Mexico's courts, leading to his arrest and conviction for libel; he was later pardoned by the governor.

Subsequently, one of the New Mexico judges Mr. Magee had targeted in his series ran into him in a Las Vegas hotel and knocked him down. Mr. Magee pulled out a revolver and fired at the judge, killing a bystander instead. He was tried and acquitted of manslaughter, but soon after left New Mexico for Oklahoma, where he started a weekly newspaper.

Mr. Magee's invention spread fast. By the early 1940s, there were more than 140,000 parking meters operating in the U.S. Retailers liked the regular turnover of parking spaces, and most drivers resigned themselves to a practical necessity. A few resentful drivers tried to "beat" the meter, inserting an inventive range of slugs -- trolley tokens, washers, plastic discs used in board games, foreign coins, paper clips, amusement park ride tokens. In Providence, R.I., police found a 14-carat gold wedding ring. Heavy blows to the head of the meter could also sometimes buy time.

In San Antonio, a local newspaper reported in 1936 that city officials were allowing parking meters for horses: "Mr. John Farmer can ride up in some mode of conveyance drawn by horse, wrap the reins around the meter, insert his nickel and ankle off to transact his business."

Write to Cynthia Crossen at