Parking lots seem to be a necessary evil. The necessity is that all of us have, like, 1and 1/4 cars each and we have to drive the dang things and put them somewhere...while we...shop and eat! The evil is that the massive expanses of concrete cover up the soil making rain water infiltration impossible; flowing water on concrete creates the real problem of urban flooding; the edges of parking lots are encrusted with petroleum (and salt in the northeast) run-off; and in my neck of the woods (Dutchess Co, NY (featured in the Times article)), snow removal maintenance is nightmarish as mammoth mounds of gray ice take months to melt. The article discusses "dead" malls, like the one a few miles down the road from where I live (picture of the Hot Dog van above), which dot the landscape. Not only is the empty mall building part of the impermeable footprint, but the unused parking lot is as well. It's hard to see anything beautiful in a parking lot.
Below is the other, better, bigger, more lasting mall near to where I live...The Galleria. Fringing this mall, you can see what the Dutchess County landscape once looked like.
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