Underground parking

A multi-storey car park (also called a parking garage, parking structure, parking ramp, parkade, parking building, parking deck or indoor parking) is a building designed for car parking and where there are a number of floors or levels on which parking takes place. It is essentially a stacked car park.

The term multistorey car park is used in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and many Commonwealth of Nations countries and commonly spelled with a hyphen. In the western United States, the term parking structure is used, especially when it is necessary to distinguish such a structure from the "garage" in a house. In some places in North America, "parking garage" refers only to an indoor, often underground, structure. Outdoor, multi-level parking facilities are referred to by a number of regional terms:

Architects and civil engineers in the USA are likely to call it a parking structure, since their work is all about structures, and that term is the vernacular in some of the western United States. When attached to a high-rise of another use, it is sometimes called a parking podium. United States building codes use the term open parking garage to refer to a structure designed for car storage that has openings along at least 40% of the perimeter, as opposed to an enclosed parking garage that requires mechanical ventilation. Natural or mechanical ventilation provides fresh air flow to disperse car exhaust in normal conditions, or hot gas and smoke in case of fire.

The earliest known multi-storey car park was built in 1918 for the Hotel La Salle at 215 West Washington Street in the West Loop area of downtown Chicago, Illinois. It was designed by Holabird and Roche. The Hotel La Salle was demolished in 1976, but the parking structure remained because it had been designated as preliminary landmark status and the structure was several blocks from the hotel. It was demolished in 2005 after failing to receive landmark status from the city of Chicago. A 49-storey apartment tower, 215 West, has taken its place, also featuring a multi-tiered parking garage.

An alternative claim has emerged from Glasgow, Scotland, for a building that was built between 1906 and 1912.

In the 1920s an English cartoonist imagined a hotel for cars; he drew a multi-storey car park.

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