What you'll see at the Merritt Mountain Music Festival

Merritt Mountain Music Festival 2003
Originally uploaded by soulstealer.

As good an argument for going as any.

Wal-Mart Parking Lot Puts Municipal Parking Lot Out Of Business | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Wal-Mart Parking Lot Puts Municipal Parking Lot Out Of Business | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

AUBURN, ME—After serving the area for more than four decades, Parking Lot 2A lowered its moveable-arm gates for the last time Friday. The much-loved municipal parking lot is only the most recent casualty of Wal-Mart parking lots.

"Shutting down the lot was a hard decision to make," said former parking-lot manager Blaine Gaffney, whose great-uncle Merle Wilson was the city public-works engineer who oversaw the construction of the lot in 1962. "We were just breaking even as it was. Then along comes Wal-Mart, just giving away parking for free, and we simply couldn't keep up."

Run by three generations of attendants, Lot 2A offered locals a safe, accessible, low-cost setting to park their cars.

"We were proud of how we ran our parking lot," said Gaffney, the walls of whose office were once decorated with photographs of lot staffers posing with loyal motorists and their cars. "People came from all over the county to park here. We served a lot of good, hardworking people for four decades. Not a lot of people can say that these days."

When the final car left Friday evening, Gaffney likened Lot 2A to a nuclear test site. Gray and featureless, save for the odd crack in the concrete, and eerily quiet, the lot hardly seemed the place where WCSH-6 newscaster Bill Green once parked his Audi. Without question, Lot 2A's days of celebrity patronage are no more.

"When that lot was built 44 years ago, it took nearly a month of backbreaking work to get it into shape," Gaffney said. "My wife's dad and my cousins on my mom's side got down on their hands and knees to help smooth the concrete themselves. This new one, they just came in with some Mexicans and dumped the cement."