It's easy to overlook these booths. They're not exactly glamorous. They're stripped down to the essentials. A shelter for the parking attendant. A place to stash keys and cash. Some of the booths are standardized: identical steel-and-glass boxes that someone probably ordered from a parking industry supply catalog. My favorite booths, though, look homemade. Each one is an eccentric little solution to a simple set of functional demands. This one at Larned and Beaubien is half Buckingham Palace guardhouse, half West Virginia outhouse.

There's a family resemblance between a parking booth and a porta-pot. Each is scaled to a single human being. Considering how often we humans dream big dreams of livin' large, it's kind of humbling to realize that little boxes like these are more than big enough to contain us.

And maybe I'm crazy, but this one on Larned looks like it belongs to the Prairie School. Notice the wide eaves?