Park Meter, a photo by kevinmccauley on Flickr.

The Last Days of the Old Parking Meter:

The city will remove its last decommissioned single-space parking meter in Manhattan on Monday, transportation officials said, the start of a yearlong process that will eventually eliminate all the steel-and-sludge-hued meters in the city.

A few stragglers will still remain in Manhattan, in areas like the Upper West Side, but their brains will be removed and the inert pole repurposed for a new use: a bicycle rack.

A silent fixture of the streetscape that became an improbable icon of a car-choked metropolis, the Manhattan meter would have turned 60 on the day of its demise. The cause of death, officials said, was an acute case of obsolescence.

The old-fashioned, pole-mounted meter will now yield to the robotlike Meter of Tomorrow: a solar-powered box, equipped with Wi-Fi, that can handle eight parking spaces at once and can shut itself down on free-parking Sundays.
…
On Monday, only a few blocks from that historic site, the final meter, No. 101-0655, will be lifted from its perch on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, just north of 125th Street. Down the block, a sparkling new Muni-Meter has already been installed.