What I mean is, what is it called?

If it had been a "green wall," you'd have complained that it wasn't a mural.

PM, You are correct that the meters vary in the turnover time and in the cost depending on location. I will check on getting this information readily available. Thanks, Bill

So help us visualize this a little better. Would you see using bucket trucks to pluck the green beans from 40 feet up this vertical vegetable garden, or would it be more interesting to have people rappel down from the top? I'm guessing rappelling would be the thing, because the bucket trucks would have idling diesel engines going for days on end, or really all summer if you had a variety of crops ripening throughout the growing season.

Were any architects or landscape architects consulted about the project? Surely it would be feasible to cleverly introduce some 'urban wilderness' into downtown.

Sorry, just not clever enough I guess. If we had wanted urban wilderness perhaps poison ivy would have been the ticket. Gosh, I feel a bit of responsibility here so I will like to beg for folks' indulgence to discuss a bit. The garage is privately owned. The project, such as it was, had to be acceptable both the the garage owner and the adjoining property owner. We had a very small amount of money to work with. This was an effort based on persuasion and cooperation and good will of a lot of parties.

The historic photos were my idea. The idea of drawing in the group stemmed from that original thought. One of the main reasons we structured the process as we did was to make it possible to take place in a reasonable time with broad public acceptance. Obviously the ivy or vegetable garden you have come up with would protrude onto other properties, be quite costly, have operating expenses, liability concerns. But simply put, it was not we proposed to do. And FWIW we did have architects involved as part of our group. Like so many things that actually get done, this efforts involved framing this in terms of the art of the possible, and the involvement of multiple stakeholders.

The premise of your original post was that people who lived there were not happy with the pictures. I don't think there is a bit of evidence to support that. The corollary is that these phantom unhappy people would have preferred a hanging garden on the side, an arrangement that I have not even heard of in this country and that would not be feasible in any case.

I do recall some well meaning discussion of a climbing wall in Chattanooga. We even explored that a bit but found that it was a very different setting and ownership structure and not possible.

I don't know how much googling you had to do to arrive at your alternative. The article you draw on is from the UK Daily Mail. It references letting ivy grow on university buildings rather than knocking it off. It is not about building or garage design. The argument is that this helps with heating and cooling and does not do any damage to the structure. The article does not deal with a situation remotely like that which we had here.

Look, let a thousand flowers bloom in the garden of ideas. I thought our solution to a tough problem was pretty creative. A whole lot of people got together to make a bit of lemonade from some lemons left over from the rules of property lines and building codes.

The kind of gratuitously manufactured negativity inherent at the root of this discussion is unfortunately increasingly typical of much of our political engagement at all levels of government. I have to admit that I am flummoxed by this sort of approach. I don't understand the motivation or the desired effect.

Yes, we did "Thing A" rather than either nothing or some hypothetical "Thing B" or possibly "Thing C" such as a gigantic Drive-In movie or a vertical pizza oven.

Thanks for noticing the pictures and have a nice day.

More precisely, the news is that the sensors in the meters are being turned on. The time limits are technically already enforced, but as long as people have been able to feed the meters, there wasn't an easy way to know if a car had been in a given space longer than the limit. (Short of chalking tires, which they did on Gay Street before the meters went in.)

We're working on getting an updated meter map showing the different time limits, hours and rates. Almost all of the meters downtown are two-hour maximum or less ($1.50 an hour), except for Central south of Marble Alley and the north end of the Gay Street Viaduct and Depot Ave., which are currently 10-hour maximums at 30 cents an hour.

I distinctly remember posting a question here last night (but alas I also remember 4 IPAs)

Q: Do the time limits still apply after such time as parking is free? Recently parked at 10pm, meter says "free parking--2 hour limit".