by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, April 14, 2023.
In the spring of 1949, Exeter’s business district bloomed not with flowers, but with silver parking meters. After quick approval from the town selectmen, “the speed with which the holes were drilled and the hollow pipes positioned, however, caught many residents by surprise,” wrote the Exeter News-Letter on May 15th. The meters were placed along Water Street from Great Bridge to Swasey parkway on the river side and from Clifford to Center Street on the opposite side. They then extended along Center Street and Front Street around the square. “Tempers became ruffled in a few instances where residents and businessmen discovered meters being arbitrarily set up a uniform distance apart without regard to location. Thus, the meter pipes with their glistening silver paint will be found at the front doors of several residences, and in front of the Catholic and Congregational Churches.”
Parking meters were still a new idea when Exeter adopted them. Invented in the 1930s and manufactured by the Magee Hale Park-O-Meter Company in Oklahoma. Carl Magee was a newspaper editor and parking officer in Oklahoma City. He enlisted the help of engineering students to develop a clock-like machine that would run without the need for electric power. Seen as a way to prevent cars from taking up valuable parking spaces all day long, they had the added benefit of raising funds to pay for themselves and support the traffic officers who monitored them. It seemed like a win-win situation. Local business owners were enthusiastic supporters of the plan, as limited parking time would bring in more customers.
In New Hampshire, the very idea of parking meters was legally questioned. After all, the parking fee and possible fines could be viewed as a form of tax. The constitutionality went as far as the New Hampshire Supreme Court. It took an act of the legislature to allow local police commissions to have the authority to install parking meters.
Exeter’s 250 meters cost $65.00 each. This was paid in installments to the Magee Hale Park-O-Meter Company from the coins collected. The cost for parking was one cent for 12 minutes, two cents for 24 minutes, three cents for 36 minutes, four cents for 48 minutes and five cents for an hour on Water Street. On Center Street, there was two-hour parking for five cents. Fines were set at fifty cents. Many of the meters were placed in locations that had previously had granite hitching posts. These had been installed sometime around the 1880s. After the parking meters arrived, the downtown was left with only one hitching post in front of Albertus T. Dudley’s home on the square. The others were moved to other parts of town, and it is possible to still see them today standing at the ends of local driveways – just waiting for fledgling drivers to crash into.
After two years, the News-Letter remarked that, “the parking meters prove a financial boon to the town, and their benefits far outweigh any inconvenience, and isolated cases of injustice they engender.”
For the next 23 years, the meters did their job. The Exeter business district, however, began to change. Shopping centers just outside of town offered one-stop shopping with easy (and free) parking lots. The fee structure hadn’t changed in all those years. A 1973 article related, “as for the income from the meters, it seems to be providing a proportionately smaller percentage of the cost of the meter patrolmen each year. And, as the critical observer points out to the News-Letter, the dwindling income factor is quite understandable for two reasons. Twenty-five percent of the meters are not working, and this factor contributes to the second reason which is lack of enforcement of the parking ordinances.” In April of that year, after receiving a letter of recommendation from the Exeter Area Chamber of Commerce, the selectmen voted on a six-month trial lifting the parking restrictions. In August, after favorable responses from the general public, it was decided to remove the old meters. They came down before winter – the snow removal crews had always despised the meters anyway. The era of the parking meter had come to an end.
Barbara Rimkunas is curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Support the Exeter Historical Society by becoming a member! Join online at: www.exeterhistory.org
Image: Exeter parking meters on Water Street in 1955.