LDS Hospital parking lot
Monday, August 23, 2004
LDS Hospital from 7th Ave at C StreetI stopped by LDS Hospital on my way home from the Saturn dealership this afternoon. I wanted to visit the hospital's gift shop to see what kind of point-of-sale system they use, part of ongoing efforts at converting the gift shop my mom runs in St. Mark's Hospital from older manual registers to a POS/scanning system to simplify the shop's operations.
The parking spaces on the streets around the hospital fill up quickly each day, and the streets in the surrounding residential areas are permit-parking only. I have a guest-use permit for the resident-parking areas east of the hospital about a block away, but I would've had to negotiate my through the building via the emergency-room entrance. I figured the gift shop is probably near the hospital's main entrance on 8th Ave and C Street, so I drove into the visitor-parking structure directly across the street from that entrance instead.
LDS Hospital parking garage: When Signage AttacksThe lot was full and I ended up driving to the 6th floor. As I rounded the corners, it occurred to me this was the first time I'd been in this garage in a car. I've been in the structure hundreds of times before, starting shortly after it was built in the early 1980s. We used to carry our bicycles up the stairs to the top floor and rip down the ramps at insane speeds. This was possible because just after they completed the garage, there were rarely more than 40 or 50 vehicles using it at any given time, and they all stayed along the first two floors. That left us with four floors of high-speed insanity before we encountered traffic, usually.
On my second loop of the 5th and 6th floors I found a space, parked the car, made my way down the stairs, wandered into the hospital (I hadn't been in there in probably 20 years either), found the gift shop and saw what I needed, headed back to the structure and my car. Total time: 9 minutes.
That's when I saw an amusing signage goof on the garage's fifth floor.
I imagine some poor sign painter was rushing along and slapped the template on the crossbeam without paying much attention to what he was doing. But he certainly immortalized his efforts.