Let today’s media tell that story. For starters, garage gurus have their own magazine, Garage Trader, and in the twenty-first century, the garage even got its own coffee-table book.
“It’s about time,” says author Kira Obolensky who notes that in 2001,17 percent of newly constructed homes included a garage for no less than three vehicles. Obolensky covers just about every square inch of ground that has anything to do with the topic of garages and does so beautifully. In fact, I’d give the world to live in any one of the garages photographed exquisitely in her book, which, notably, is subtitled Reinventing the Place We Park.
About the time Obolensky’s book was released, the cable channel HGTV (House and Garden Television) featured a restored 1896 firehouse garage that was home to the family car (an antique ambulance), a neon-sign collection, and a full-size diner turned playhouse. Another feature showcased a garage with a thirty—five- foot cathedral ceiling and kiva fireplace surrounded by overstuffed chairs—all of which were the backdrop for a large collection of racing and rally cars. If anything, the designers of these places deserve a hurray for imaginatively conceiving luscious variations on the otherwise boring practice of consumerism.

What do you make of a home that does not have a garage? My house maintains this distinction. There is no dwelling place for my Japanese version of the national icon spawned by creative tinkerer Henry Ford. There is no place for the cat box, a freezer, or things accumulated for a summer tag sale. No storage for empty Gateway computer boxes, pickling jars, rakes and shovels, winter tires, or the delightfully useless lamp I got at someone else’s tag sale. No roof to protect me from rain so I can paint that old bookshelf. No space to save my daughters’ childhood souvenirs. No place, of course, for all the changes that life brings: little bikes, then big ones, a revolving variety of hobbies, clothes in all sizes waiting for thrift-store pickup, or the seasonal decorations that proliferate each year.
My neighbor, a real estate agent, tells me that my lack of a garage will be a big deficit should I decide to rent or sell my house. I study all the other houses up and down the street. Sure enough, mine is the only one without a big blank door staring back. Quite plainly, my home does not live up to the American dream. It does not communicate the spirit of American affluence and enterprise to passersby, for if anything in the early part of the twenty-first century, the United States is known and imaged by its automobiles; highways; drive-thru restaurants, banks, pharmacies, dry cleaners, and other drive-thru businesses; and—most significantly—multi car garages.