As with about half of my Lego collection from when I was a kid, I have absolutely no idea where I got this set from. Being a resident of far western Texas, I wasn't exactly jet-setting around the world to Switzerland when this thing came out considering I would've been around six years old, so I'm sure my parents would've picked it up for their Lego-obsessed kid at some point, somewhere. Unfortunately that information has long been lost by the relentless sands of time, so I have no idea where this came from.

That being said, I really like this little thing. The model is good and looks like what it should look like, the parts selection is excellent considering how few of them there are, this little piece looks fantastic in any Lego town, and overall it's a great impulse set, the likes of which I wish more existed.

As I've stated before, as a kid I always thought it lent credence to my Lego town to model and display scenes and buildings that I'd actually seen in real life. It's not every day you see a three-headed dog facing down Harry Potter in a magical duel, but it is every day you see mundane things like parking lot attendants or a police patrol car or a bank. I'm pretty well aware that most little kids wouldn't think like that and find it hard to get all excited about a parking lot attendant or a car wash set, but I vividly remember these being my favorites. I'm also a lifelong model railroader where modeling the most mundane, run of the mill scenes imaginable is the stated goal, so maybe I'm just a weirdo.

The Model: That all being said, this is about as realistic of a parking lot attendant's stand that you can expect to be modeled in a blocky stud-based medium for the price of around three dollars USD. It actually looks the part. Maybe not the most realistic thing on the planet but close enough that if you use your imagination (which you have to for everything, remember, blocky building medium) you can pretty easily see this thing on your city streets protecting the entrance to, say, a restaurant, or police station. My only problem with it is the scale: The drawbar on the stand is far, far too small to actually serve its stated purpose properly. Your Lego vehicle trying to enter the parking lot has to be about two studs wide in order for it to look right. You can extend it with your own bricks obviously but that makes it go way out of scale in the other direction. The solution I found is to just build two and have them on opposite sides of the entrance to your "lot", which makes it a bit more realistic.

Building Experience: It's as good as a set with fewer than 20 parts can be. Maybe not the best, but it is what it is. I'd recommend adding a 2x2 white plate on top of the drawbar holding assembly and below the window, that makes the drawbar stay on slightly better. Don't know why they didn't just do this in the stock set as-is, but I'm a sucker for over reinforcing things.

Parts: There are 19 parts, and four of them are rare and two of them are uncommon. That's a pretty good ratio considering the size of the model. The big "P" parking tile is printed and extremely rare, the hazard striped tile is rare and printed, the telephone brick is extremely rare and printed, and the clear panel is reasonably rare and always insanely useful to have (they make great windows in MOC's). The attendant's shirt isn't particularly common and looks sharp, and the hinged plate brick assembly is always useful to have more of. Great selection of parts here.

Playability: Hard to give it super high marks... It's a parking lot attendant, what do you want? However, the displayability is quite high and you can make many attractive scenes with it, so I'm not giving it the lowest mark. With more accessories or something it'd have gotten a higher score but as is, there isn't much you can do with it on its own. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Value For Money: As with a lot of these cool old rare sets, you basically have to import it, which considering how low the cost of it is I'd highly recommend doing. Bricklink has tons of them for sale, all from overseas, and unfortunately the shipping and wait times with that tends to be pretty high which drives down the value slightly. In the past when it was two or three dollars? Very much worth it. These days? Still probably worth it, just less so. Don't go out of your way for it, but if you're already buying a bigger, better set from abroad, add it to your cart. You won't regret it. Recommended.

An integrable, although poorly contructed town set

Pros

• - good parts
• - minifig
  

Cons

• - too small
• - poor construction

A bit useless, but never wrong. Your people need parking-lots, but it's not sure if they need the Parking Gate Attendant

This is a very simple model of the LEGO Town theme. This impulse set is built very quickly and it almost has no play features. We get one minifig who has the basic blue jacket for the old LEGO Town theme, black pants, a black cap and the basic LEGO Town face with black shades. This minifig isn't really that special.

What I don't like about that building with the barrier is, that this set is too small. It could have been bigger because the gateway for the parking area is not so small in real life. The only play feature in this set is that you're able to open the barrier. But we get some nice pieces which you can use for brickfilms and MOC's for sure.

All in all, this set is an okay set and I would recommend you to get this. You can find this set on eBay and BrickLink for sure. Here is the link where you can check out the full gallery I made for this set on my website: www.klokriecher.de


Videos I made of this set:

Stopmotion