Biography

Monroe Carell, Jr. grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, graduated with honors from Vanderbilt University, and then did something that surprised even him — he went into parking.

It started with a single gravel lot between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in downtown Nashville, operated by his father. In 1966, his father asked Monroe to join him. Monroe spent months studying the business and decided he wasn't going to just run a parking company. He was going to build one.

His breakthrough came in St. Louis, where he pioneered a concept that would reshape the industry: shared parking. Monroe convinced city officials that a hotel, an office building, and a retail complex don't all need their parking at the same time. By proving that shared spaces could serve multiple uses, he helped developers build smarter — and saved them millions in the process.

Those early contracts — the Mansion House in St. Louis, Crown Center in Kansas City — were just the beginning. Over forty years, Central Parking grew from a handful of Nashville lots into the largest parking management company in the world, operating more than four thousand locations and parking two million cars every single day.

In 1995, Central Parking went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Monroe also believed that success came with responsibility. He built a freestanding children's hospital in Nashville that bears his name. He was honored by Pope John Paul II as a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great.

He lived by a simple test: if you couldn't lay your head on the pillow and rest easy, you hadn't done the right thing.

Please welcome Monroe Carell, Jr. — posthumously — into the Parking Hall of Fame.