The garage appears to be between eight and fifteen stories, which according to surrealists, it technically is.
Baltimore’s Cubist Art Museum’s new parking garage was initially hailed as the greatest work of steel and concrete art ever conceived, but has reluctantly been relabeled "a million tons of stupidity" by city officials.
The museum expected a sharp rise in attendance upon completion of the $13 million structure, but instead, admissions have fallen by more than 40% from last year. At fault may be the undeniably complex navigation of the 400 car parking garage wooing unsuspecting, would-be visitors with the promise of free parking.
"We've been looking [for our car] for three hours," says Will Cashman, who visited the museum with his son, "we keep walking in circles and coming to dead-end murals. It can't be that big in here, so [dude,] where's my car?"
Baltimore Police responded to at least 300 stolen car reports in the first week of operation, according to officials. "We've had to stop dispatching officers [to the garage]. The cars are all still in there somewhere, but we can't find them any better than you and we don't have the manpower to keep trying."
A misplaced vehicle is only a problem for those who actually park. A much bigger problem belongs to those who stay in their vehicles searching for reason in the intestinal maze of anger and madness.
"Everything is one-way and a lot of it you can't even drive on," said one visibly frustrated motorist who had been driving around the structure for over three hours. "The kids haven't eaten, I can't find a way back out and we're almost out of gas."
AAA tow trucks are routinely called out by drivers who have run out of gas or demand to be towed back to the street, but tow truck drivers have strict instructions not to respond.
Ed from Ed's Towing explains the unusual policy. "The low clearance sign doesn't even use real numbers. We've gotten stuck, we've hit our lights on the ceiling and we've banged into those stupid mirrors they put everywhere. Why would anyone put floor to ceiling mirrors in a place where people drive?"
The professionals aren't the only ones having accidents in the garage. Drivers report crashing into paintings of driveways, sliding down deceptively steep ramps and scraping up their cars in narrow passages of "odd perspective".
Earl Walker, a retired school teacher from Tuscaloosa says, "I've been to the Winchester Mystery House, that mansion designed to confuse ghosts. That was nothing compared to this."
Others have complained about parking spaces that don't exist in usable dimensions, ramps that corkscrew, seemingly endless stairwells, and garage maps posted every forty-feet, but no two remotely similar.
Museum curator Pascal Megalia offers no apologies to the myriad complaints. "We don't charge for this exhibit. We've got the single largest work of cubist art on display for people to experience free of charge. If it conformed to the parking garage norm, it might be useful, but it wouldn't be very cubist, now would it? Genius can never be appreciated in its time. In a hundred years people will look back and understand the beauty of what we've done here."
Drivers and pedestrians we spoke to in the garage agreed they'd likely still be wandering the ramps and walkways themselves in a hundred years, unless a search party is launched soon. In 2104 they may sing praises, but today most of the comments we heard were not fit to print.
