The Pleasures of Vintage Parking Meters

Including one that I just acquired.

Some particularly gorgeous old meters with red lights to indicate that the allotted time had expired.

I’ve always liked coin-operated gadgets, going back to my childhood. There’s something very pleasing about putting a coin in the slot, hearing it make its way through the mechanism, and then twisting a knob (or pulling a handle, or pushing a button, or whatever).

As a kid, I’d think about how cool it would be to have coin-operated gadgetry in our home. Happily, I’ve been able to make that a reality in my adult life. At various points, I’ve owned a Coke machine (which worked), a pay phone (which did not), a stamp machine, a gum machine, two parking meters (one of which was still mounted on its original pole!), and maybe a few other things I’m forgetting. I sold all of those things when I moved to my current apartment in 2018, but lately I’ve been feeling the coin-op itch. E got me a beautiful gumball machine for my birthday earlier this year, and a few weeks ago I decided to dip my toe back into the parking meter pool.

A parking meter might seem like an odd thing to desire, because it doesn’t have the inherent fun factor of, say, a soda machine or a gumball machine. But when I was a kid, my father used to let me feed the meter when he parked, and I always loved doing it. Part of it, I think, is that I’ve always found entertainment value in almost any mechanical gizmo. In addition, parking meters feel very official in a way that appealed to me as a child and still pushes my buttons today. So even though it may sound weird, I actually feel nostalgic about them (especially now that coin-op meters have largely been supplanted by more modern versions). Judging by all the vintage meters that can be found on eBay, I’m not the only one who feels this way.

I didn’t want a complete meter on a pole, or even one with its full original housing — just the basic internal mechanism. I also wanted one made by Duncan, one of the two primary meter manufacturers of the last century, because most Duncan meters had a center knob for the customer to turn. Duncan’s chief rival, the engagingly named Park-O-Meter, had a superior brand name, obviously, but their meters were knobless, which I find less satisfying. (Park-O-Meter is still in business today, making digital meters under the vastly inferior moniker POM Incorporated.)

After a bit of online shopping, I got this Duncan 5090 mechanism for 50 bucks:

I like how the bare internal mechanism, stripped of its exterior housing, has a fun steampunk-ish feel.

This meter would give you a half-hour of parking for 5¢, an hour for 10¢, and two hours for any combination of nickels and dimes totaling 20¢. Based on that, a quarter should have yielded two and a half hours, but two hours was the maximum time allowed, so using a quarter was a poor value. The meter instructions tacitly acknowledged this by saying that you could use a quarter “for convenience” (i.e., because it’s a single coin):

The back of the meter has a little nub, which an attendant could turn with a special key to wind the meter’s clock mechanism, similar to winding a wristwatch:

I don’t yet have a key, but they’re easy to find, so I’ll get one soon. For now, the meter has enough stored-up tension to run smoothly without being wound.

The meter has two flags — the red “Time Expired” flag and a yellow “Violation” flag, which is stamped with a serial number: