By rights

Air Rights Garage—ten charming levels of suspended concrete.

York Street passes underneath, a several-lane one-way wide enough to accommodate fourteen metered spots, seven on each side. The Brutalists didn’t even care, did they—it was all about Function. Dunkin Donuts (nurse central); “Corner Pizza” (usually empty); “Sam’s Food Club” (a little busier); and some chiropractic and dental offices line either side of the street, literally supporting the garage. The little parcels each of these businesses sit on are way long and narrow, corridors with snaky food counters and two-by-ten table arrays and bathrooms way in the back. They have to be. CT-34 surrounds the garage, a six-lane divided highway with a concrete hulk for a median. Only by approaching the thing from the side, on York, and passing under its angular arches can you really appreciate its bulk. What a nightmare! Actual parking levels don’t start till you’re three stories up. Beneath them, in the bowels behind the back ends of the shops and offices (which float out into the gloom like shipsterns), are gigantic symmetrical caverns, empty except for rubble-strewn craters, dirt piles and the idle excavation equipment that occasionally roars to life to cart fill—a truly efficient use of land in this case—to the construction site a few blocks up the road. Between here and there are more median lots, more cars, more fences and more dirt. But the bulky square support structure rising up from the transplanted earth up the road looks suspiciously like it wants to form the basis for another garage, hopefully a bit shinier and handsomer this one. Why not? Crumbling old churches and boarded up brownstones with their sad punch-out windows line the outer edges of this strange thoroughfare, housing no one willing or able to say much about it. Air Rights was probably welcomed as a necessary evil when it was built, the pocket shops underneath offered at the altar of jobs here jobs now by the XYZ Hospital Area Development Corporation or some such. It’s a novel solution to a tricky problem—once you punch the highway through the densely-built historic core, what do you do with all that marginal extra land you’ve debased and devalued? Or maybe it was decided in reverse: it’s 1964, everyone’s driving everywhere all the sudden, and the growing teaching hospital immediately to the west of the new abomination of a surface street they’re planning to punch through a declining black neighborhood to accommodate this strange new behavior needs somewhere to put all those goddamn vehicles converging here every day. The urban-planning equivalent of situational hitting, in other words.