ENTREPRENEUR CASTS HIS LOT ON PARKING

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 8, 1992                   TAG: 9201080089
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
ENTREPRENEUR CASTS HIS LOT ON PARKING
The slamming of car doors. The tick-tick-tick of a cooling engine. The drip of hot motor oil. The anguished howls of passengers who've closed the door on the waist belt of their freshly dry-cleaned trench coats.
The parking lot behind the Hotel Roanoke soon may be filled again with the happy sounds of a motoring public - two full years and change after the grand old lot fell silent.
Sherman McCann is nearing an agreement with the Virginia Tech Foundation to rent the lot and, in turn, lease its 290 spaces.
The foundation is the illegitimate parent of the orphaned hotel. Together, the waifs are searching now for a rich uncle to underwrite the revival of the grand old motel.
The grandness of the vision has proven so mesmerizing that no one has found a useful role for the grand old wood-and-stucco tower since 1989.
Until Sherman McCann's parking emporium.
He's been soliciting Norfolk Southern Corp. workers who now toil in the brick buildings on Jefferson Street, across from the grand old Tudor-style thing. By the end of this month, railroad workers are going to start moving to the new NS building downtown.
They'll need someplace to park.
They can park in the Williamson Road garage across the street, but they'll first have to get on a two-year waiting list, and then pay $42.50 a month.
Waiting lists for the Campbell Court ($42.50 monthly parking) and Market Square ($50) parking garages are nearly three years long. The Downtown East garage, which isn't built yet on Church Avenue, already has a 275-car waiting list. The Church Avenue/Texas Tavern garage ($44) isn't even adding to its list of waiters anymore. The Dominion Tower ($55), this city's most tony place to park your steed, has spaces available. The price does not include a daily engine waxing or continental drive-thru breakfast.
Roanoke's thirst for parking is unslaked.
For $20 a month, motorists will be able to park al fresco in Sherman McCann's parking lot, bounded by Williamson, Wells, Shenandoah and the grand old asbestos-infested inn. The lot is an invigorating walk from downtown, just a hop, skip, viaduct, Hotel Earle, dilapidated former boxing gym, closed Grand Exchange furniture store, well-appointed comedy club and a jump away from the new Norfolk Southern building.
McCann, retired from 37 1/2 years with Norfolk Southern, has no plans to build a cable car between the cupola of the hotel and the roof of the NS building, though it has been suggested (by me) and easily could be financed (by you).
McCann will keep abreast of nighttime goings-on at the nearby civic center and will keep the lot open for overflow in the event the Platters and the Shirelles compete again for clients with Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Ludwig van Beethoven, as they did with disastrous parking results in November. Next time, Sherman McCann will be there.
"Parking's not my livelihood," he says, "but this is an endeavor, I think, that the city could use."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB