Plastic skater

Consider the cheap plastic toy. They've been around in one form another since the 30s. Soldiers, dinosaurs, farm animals, countless thousands of different different types made all over the world. We don't think much about them, some wind up in bags in thrift stores, most end up getting thrown away. But someone had to sculpt a master model for every one of them. Somebody's job was to make an astronaut, or a space alien, or a chicken, so it could be turned into a mold to make thousands more. And some of them are pretty good. I've seen a few cheap plastic farm animals in thrift stores an thought, "hey, someone took some time with this one". But not this one. It lacks charm. Even if it had all of its limbs, it just isn't appealing. Or maybe I'm just expecting too much from plastic. 

ID		130009
Object		Toy figure of a skateboarder
Material		Plastic
Dimensions
Provenance		Dallas, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

Bottle caps

Bottle caps are the indestructible kings of junk in old country bar and country store parking lots. They get embedded in the blacktop and stick around for decades. Sometimes there are hundreds of them, some still with a little of their paint, but most burnished black by years of traffic and weather. These were on a concrete lot in front of a taco joint and are probably not very old.

ID		130008
Object		Bottle cap
Material		Steel, paint
Dimensions		25mm
Provenance		Dallas, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

Tire weight

One of the most common pieces of parking lot junk, used to balance tires, these things seem to fall off in the slightest breeze. They used to be made of lead, which was horrible - they wind up in storm drains, and therefore int he water - but nowadays they're made from zinc or steel, which isn't as horrible. A old lead weight still shows up from time to time, but it's either from a 1970 Delta 88 or it's been sitting around for a long time.

ID		130007
Object		Tire weight
Material		Steel
Dimensions		40mm
Provenance		Dallas, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

Pulley

I can imagine some alien archaeologist one day, long after we're gone, sifting through the dirt looking for signs of civilization. They might find a bone or two, a few teeth, and then something like this. Smashed and rusted almost beyond recognition. We might be able to squint at it just right and say "aha! a pulley!", but will they? And if they do, will they assume we were some sort of weird, pulley based society, all of our machinery and commerce based on hoisting things in the air? Nah, probably not.

ID		130006
Object		Pulley
Material		Steel
Dimensions		70mm
Provenance		Dallas, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

Wire

This was left over after some chain link fence repair at Kidd Springs Park in Dallas. Usually this sort of thing is swept up by the folks doing the repairs, but this one was wedged behind a concrete parking space stop and easy to miss. Besides the obvious aesthetic and archaeological appeal, some parking lot junk, like this wire, still has some functional life left in it.

ID		130005
Object		Wire
Material		Aluminum
Dimensions		120mm
Provenance		Kidd Springs Park, Dallas, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

Window glass

This is probably a piece of car window glass. Either someone was broken into or else this is left over from a recent hail storm that smashed a lot of car windows in the area. Either way, someone had a bad day. Still, it's pretty. I especially like the little fracture at upper right.

ID		130004
Object		Automobile window glass fragment
Material		Glass
Dimensions		10mm
Provenance		Dallas, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

Pull tab

These used to be everywhere. It's one of those things kids under a certain age might not recognize now. This one was found at the remote Heart of Texas Park, near Brady, and it may have been there for decades. It has a nice feel to it. 

ID		130003
Object		Pull tab
Material		Aluminum
Dimensions		45mm
Provenance		McCulloch County, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

Car light lens

There's a lot of this in parking lots, once you start looking. Most of them from someone's car backing up into someone else's. So really this is the remnant of what might have been a pretty heated exchange. Even ground down a little, it's still doing a nice job of reflecting.

ID		130002
Object		Automobile lens fragment
Material		Plastic
Dimensions		14mm
Provenance		Dallas, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

Swivel

We found this tiny piece of fishing gear embedded in a blacktop country road near Lake Limestone, Texas. It's a simple thing, and you see them everywhere around a popular fishing hole like this, but it occurs to me that a lot of technology and effort went into making it. Someone had to design the thing. It's brass, so tin and zinc had to be mined, then alloyed into brass, then shipped off somewhere to cast the little bead part, some of it stretched to make the wire. Then it had to be put together and packaged. The package is paper, plastic and ink, so petroleum had to be pumped, refined, and whatever else is done to make clear plastic sheets. The paper came from trees that were cut down, processed, pulped, milled into paper the right thickness and quality, then cut into cards and driven by someone to the swivel factory. The ink on the package, etc etc. It's a lot of effort, and it's just one tiny part of what's usually take on a fishing trip. The Tawokoni people who used to live here, long before there was a lake, weren't dependent on someone else's production to eat, and fished in the creeks using traps and arrows that they made themselves.

ID		130001
Object		Fishing swivel
Material		Brass
Dimensions		12mm
Provenance		Limestone County, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk

About the Museum

The Museum highlights discarded bits of technology found in parking lots, streets, and sidewalks, the more durable fragments of humanity that do not quickly dissolve with the rain.

Inspired by Hardin Jones, who kept a small travelling collection of parking lot junk in a shoe box, like a cabinet of curiosity assembled by an early naturalist.

Please enjoy your visit!