NO
PARKING
NO
PARKING
a photographic masters thesis completed at University of Massachusetts, Boston
January, 2001
NO PARKING can be used via this Creative Commons License. I will be shocked and pleased if you set it to music, adapt it for a screenplay, post it as a You Tube video, or otherwise make this work famous. So please, make people laugh, and tell me about it. You are heroes: gina@arkone.org -- Gina Rheault -- ARKONE.ORG
Dedication:
To all of you who think you know "those people" who mark parking spaces. You who think you know "their neighborhoods". You who mark parking spaces yourselves. You, of all people, may really know what this is all about. On the other hand, perhaps there's something to be learned.
This is a story about marked parking spaces on public streets in Boston during the winter of 1999-2000. It is a story of the unexpected: a street where people marked parking spaces well beyond snow season, all year round, even as spring brought buds and blossoms to its doorsteps.
Law and public policy students may be interested in the analysis and bibliography. Scholars should care about methods, the story of the story. And visual sociologists, street researchers, may find helpful comments on historical research and computers. Others may prefer to skip straight to the pictures page. Jump to your own conclusions or jump to my conclusions.
Gina Rheault, Dispute Resolution Program, College of Public & Community Service, University of Massachusetts, Boston. January, 2001.
A
very special thank you to my ever so patient, and always encouraging advisor,
Susan Opotow at
the University of Massachusetts,Boston, who conceived the original idea, brainstormed
it, then gave it to me, and let me run with it. And to Jody
Rosenblatt-Naderi,of Texas A&M University,for her spontaneous, thoughtful,
creative and poetic evaluation which caused a gasp or two in people with great
power over my life. I would not have had it any other way.
Also, to the late Blake McKelvey, who died in September 13, 2000 at the impressive age of 97. Till his death, the City Historian Emeritus of Rochester, NY, Blake McKelvey lives on in a lifetime of historical research. At 92, he wrote the only known history of snow in American cities. His beautifully illustrated stories of snowbelt cities, gave me the context to understand the changes brought by cars in cities.
To all who contributed stories, research and suggestions, from New Mexico to Saudi Arabia, to Dorchester, Massachusetts -- and there are so many of you -- thank you. And to all who will read this, I send my deepest thanks.
IntroductionPeople laugh when I describe my project about marking parking spaces in Boston. They turn reminiscent, and their mind's eye travels back to some momentous snowstorm, or to a car moment. And soon they are telling a lively, passionate story of parking, or shoveling----and writing another chapter.
Parking problems happen around the world. But marking parking spaces does not. It happens in American snow belt cities like Chicago, New Haven, Allentown, and Boston, but not in the grandest city of all, the Big Apple, New York City. It happens on spacious, mansioned streets in Jamaica Plain, but not on posh Beacon Hill. "Oh no, dear. You can't hold a parking space on Beacon Hill," an elegant, elderly resident tells me in her Brahmin accent.
Beneath parking behavior sat a whole world of unwritten rules and unspoken negotiations. Informal law was the key to understanding the everyday rules of marking space on a public street. And the unexpected popped up. When spring came around, the formal law of resident parking replaced the old informal law on triple-fortified Tower Street in Forest Hills, and I took pictures.
"They wouldn't last a minute in New York." she says. And she, the native New Yorker, should know. I shrug, "Well, this is Boston." It is a cold, gray day in February.We are driving along winter-worn street in Dorchester, Massachusetts. A street of three deckers with chainlink fences, postage stamp yards, frozen under a gray mantle. This is winter in the city, winter in Boston, everywhere a cement of grainy grime, icy detritus stacked and welded tight to frozen sidewalks, curbs, and meager spaces along fences.
But this New Yorker continues, amazed and wondrous, as if she had arrived only yesterday, as if she had landed on a new planet. "Look at that!" she cries. "An old chair! That beat up trash can! People just take public space!"
She shakes her head in wonder. And emphasizing each word, with space and pause, she says, "How -- do -- they -- get away with that?" She has a keen eye to the everyday, to the commonplace, to the overlooked and under appreciated. She sees things and asks why --- often in the presence of acolytes, partners in crime, of which she has a few. I am one of the syndicate.
"File this under fun," I said. "We can do a pop piece some day."
I had real, serious situations to write about. I had the story of developer/community conflict on Hellenic Hill and another hill in Gloucester. But over the summer I sank with the weight of a growing certainty that I was working on yesterday's news. Land use conflict was a very old story in Boston. And all I had hoped would be new and interesting, had already been done, back in the seventies. And all those researchers and activists had gotten PhD's and were now professors. Land use conflict was old, glacial, geologic. My project was a dinosaur, extinct, a million years petrified. Susan called:
"We're still doing the parking story, aren't we?"
"Of course!" I said, "That's fun."
"Then that's your project," she said, passing the torch.
So I changed horses in midstream, and left the overworked subject of development hassles for something more intimate, the individual parking space. Marking parking spaces was the the last vestige of America's wild, wild, west. It was the last bastion of the rugged individualist, the soul of the America. I had lived in the city all my life, and now I was going to ride into its psyche.
Winter
Sometimes snow appears in Massachusetts as early as Columbus Day, in October as the foliage season is ending. Trace accumulations around Boston allow local stoics to talk about turning up the heat. "Must be winter," they'll say. "Saw some snow. Best see how the heat is working." Then in the next breath, the Yankee stoic recants, " Nope, can't turn on the heat. Not November yet."
Sometimes snow arrives in November. Daytime highs in the thirties are common, so snow, in theory, has a chance to stick. By late November, New Englanders have been breathing frost and scraping car windows for some time. Leaves are mostly gone from the trees, except for a last few hangers on the pin oaks, but its more rain than snow before December. And some time before Christmas snow arrives, symbolic, welcome, decorative, festive for the holiday season.
By January snow comes in blizzards and whiteouts and winter hurricanes.
February brings more snow, and the bizarre Valentine's Day thaw. Days get longer,
and winter recedes.March, April, and May are the jokester months where snow
comes and goes when its least wanted, least expected. It is a bizarre, rollicking
rollercoaster of weather strangeness. And then its summer.
The winter of 1999 -2000, I needed snow to graduate from UMass, Boston. I had to document weary shovelers righteously marking parking spaces. And as if the gods of winter knew this, they withheld snow. Past October, past November, past Christmas.
The Millenial New Year 2000 arrived in Paris, and in Rome, and in Sydney, and in the Fiji Islands. Time zone by time zone, time marched along. On the weather channels, clear skies dominated the New England weather maps, and weather historians declared 1999-2000 Boston's longest snowless snow season on record.
Snow finally fell on January 13, 2000, and it was pitiful.
Trying to find out who started reserving shoveled parking spaces is like trying to find out who discovered fire. No one remembers. They guess the 60's, the 50's, the 40's, but no one really remembers. And no one has pictures.
Even folks who can remember the early days of the automobile, can only guess when the marking first appeared. Today's eighty-something generation grew up in the 1920's and 1930's when a car was a rich man's touring toy. They fought a war in 1942, returned to civilian life in 1945. And when civilian goods started flowing again in 1948, they spent their hard earned money on cars. They parked their cars on the streets of Boston through some nasty winters, and protested the first parking meters in 1948, but marking is not prominent in memory.
The history of snow in the cities provides clues.
Long before cars, snow in cities was useful. The pedestrian city, as it was called, was measured as an hour's walk, about two and a half miles from the city center. In winter, packed down snow served as a base for sleighs that made intra-city transport faster and easier. Snow became an adversary only after the pedestrian cities developed public transit systems and streetcars. Snow and streetcars didn't mix, and snow had to be removed from tracks. In the era of cars and parking, snow removal problems only got worse.
Parking meters are the first real signs of parking stress. Boston installed
its first meters in 1948. Newspapers also tell the story of parking stress,
especially after a heavy snow. In 1961 the first signs of snow related stress,
and claim to a parking space appeared in the Boston Globe. An amused mother,
in a letter to the editor, told the story of her son, a commuting student at
Northeastern University, who had driven into Boston a few days after a snow
storm. He parked his car on the street and found on note on it after he returned
from class. The note said: "Don't park here. I shoveled it." 
In 1982, a story of parking mayhem from Chicago, appeared in the national news section of the Boston Globe:
When Charles Johnson saw an unoccupied car parked in a space he had shoveled clear of snow in front of his home, he got so angry he pumped six shots into it with a carbine, Chicago police said. But the vehicle was an unmarked police car, parked there by two officers questioning witnesses in a building across the street about a recent burglary.
Johnson, who had staked out his parking turf with a box on the otherwise snowy South Side street, was charged with unlawful use of a weapon and damage to city property.
By 1984 editorial pieces on space marking had started to appear in the Boston Globe. In January 1984, after Boston had suffered twenty one inches of snow, columnist Alan Richman found himself writing about parking space marking:
Throughout recorded history, man has taken common land and made it his own. First it was land on which to unt; next it was land on which to farm; now it is land on which to park. In Boston, anybody who shovels out a parking space gets to keep what he has cleared. Once shoveled, a parking space is marked with plastic barrel, vinyl chair, galvanized can, milk crate, cinder block or tire rim. The item should not be so valuable that a stranger might take a fancy to it and decide to take it home.
Mr. Richman even confronted people on marking their parking spaces after the
snow was gone: 
On Bartlett street in Charlestown, not far from Monument Square, I knocked on a door of a home with a trash can planted in the street out front. A white- haired woman with a dust rag in her hand opened the door. She admitted that the can belonged to her. "Aren't you ashamed to be keeping a space reserved after the snow is gone?" I asked.
"Not at all," she said. "I bought this place. I pay the taxes. I have only one car and I should be able to park it. If we go out to do errands at night, we can never park again."
The first photographs of the marking custom in Boston appeared in 1992-93, when record snowfall made parking a prolonged misery for everyone who had a car. On March 17, 1993 Dave Arnold of the Boston Globe wrote about the unwritten law of marking parking spaces and local attitudes:
"....there is an unwritten code in Boston that most everyone respects, or learns to: You shovel it, you own it. But only if you reserve it. And the penalty for violating this unwritten Boston parking code can be deflated tires or worse."
"How about slashed tires and fistfights, to name a few," said Richard Iannella, the city's director of code enforcement, citing some of the penalties faced by "violators."
"Illegal? Of course it's illegal!" he snapped. "But this is a very, very touchy situation with private claims to public ways. We have to exercise common sense."
Detective George Lotti, a Boston Police Department spokesman, was of two minds about the code.
"It's not legal, it's not illegal," he said. "I suppose someone can place a little reminder that much effort went into clearing the spot," he added, "and then hope it's respected." In some neighborhoods, this wintry phenomenon has become all-seasonal.
In
1996 columnist Derrick Jackson couldn't resist making his comments on parking
space marking and police non-enforcement:
Most people shovel without claiming spaces. It is also obvious that many other urban residents do not feel the same way, as witness the lawn chairs, dining room chairs, footstools, milk crates, garbage cans, buckets, sawhorses, bookcases and folding tables and orange highway cones that other snow shovellers plunk down to claim spots they have shoveled. Everyone knows it is illegal to hoard a spot. Everyone knows the law is un-enforced.
"With all the problems we have getting snow itself off the roads and with all the enforcement problems you would have, we don't pay any attention," said Joe Casazza, Boston's public works commissioner. "It's the law of the street. Some people feel intense about it."
Where "mark and park" started is a mystery. But the clues point to the late sixties and early seventies.
A timeline of car history shows the onslaught of cars from the 1930's onward.
In the late thirties and early forties, cars were still a luxury, a recreational
sport enjoyed family style in Sundays of scenic rides along touring parkways.
Parking tickets were greeted with amused disbelief. After World War II, cars
became the commuting necessities as returning veterans started families, got
jobs, moved into suburban developments. In the 1950s parking had become a problem
enough to cause urban planners to focus on parking. By the late 60's, post-war
babies had become teenagers with licenses and a need to cruise. By 1970, 82
percent of all American families had at least one car, 28 per cent had a second.:
Now close your eyes. See all those cars crowding in the city. Imagine February, 1968 and when 3 feet plus 5 inches of snow fell in single short month. Imagine 1978 - 1979 when seven feet of snow, double normal smothered Boston. And as you see the snow storms clogging the streets, see on street parking disappearing under snow piles. See the hours of shoveling, and see the weary shoveler who grabbed an old chair, plunked it down, and said, "Gawdamright. This is mine."
Dramatic Weather Channel reports of New England's drought-ending snow led me to expect an ice-slicked, snow-packed landscape the night of January 22, 2000. I had flown into Providence from San Francisco and hopped a shuttle bus to Boston. Providence had some snow cover, but not much. I asked the bus driver how the weather had been. "Oh, the roads were a little icy one day, but fine otherwise." This was not high drama. I prayed, nose pressed on the bus window, that Boston, fifty miles north, would be in worse shape than Providence had been.
Boston's streets were clear. Despite rock hard snow piles along some sidewalks, Boston seemed normal. This was not impressive snow. I doubted people would mark with such pitiful accumulation. But I vowed, despite this meager showing, to scour the city until I found a diehard, righteous snow shoveler to interview. Someone, somewhere would be marking. I would go to Southie, Somerville, Dorchester, those great, hard core, working class neighborhoods.
I rode the last four miles from South Station at midnight, surveying the streets, disappointed at the lack of snow, fearing I would find too few markers to make a master's project. My fears were short lived. As I turned the corner onto St. John Street in Jamaica Plain, I saw barrels. In diverse and friendly Jamaica Plain, barrels, cones and sawhorses had sprouted like mushrooms in a fairy forest. Southie, Dorchester, Somerville? Why bother?
The
next morning I took my camera and strolled familiar streets. The snow didn't
look very deep to me, and I found out later that it was not. Yet markers were
abundant.
A tan Rubbermaid barrel on St John St sat before the front steps of a beautiful Victorian marking a neatly shoveled space. I know this house for its well-attended neighborhood parties and the sounds of group singing on summer evenings.
A recycling bin sat squarely in the street nearby marking yet another neat spot. I know this house too. They prune their trees, have nice gardens, keep their houses nicely painted.
Up the street, a tin can here, some snowed in cars sitting unshoveled there, a cone here, and some unmarked space.
Next block over, a whole steet lay unmarked, conspicuously sloppy and unshoveled. This is a dense, narrow L-shaped street with brick apartment buildings, tight packed three deckers and a few set back single family houses.
Yet on a street a block away, with Victorian mansions and carriage houses, and single family houses and two family houses with driveways-- in short, a street with plenty of off street and on street parking, I saw two orange cones marking a generous spot.
In a nearby alley-sized public way, a very official looking NO PARKING sign
bolted to a steel pipe, anchored in a yellow painted cement block marked an
immaculate, generous parking space. NO PARKING signs permanently attached to
a chain link fence reinforced the shoveler's message. 
Markers showed up on a sparsely settled street that the borders athletic fields behind the Agassiz School. Four multi-families are the entire inventory of houses. Empty parking spots up and down the house side of street, and empty, legal parking spaces on the schoolyard side of the street. And two brown barrels marking the corner space.
It didn't make sense. Friendly neighbors with markers. Mansions with markers. Dense streets, no markers. Empty streets with markers. I asked the mailman on Grovenor Road his thoughts on marking. He said, "Hey, you shovel a parking space, you want your parking space." Then he laughed. "This side of Jamaica Plain isn't too bad," he said. "If you want to see wild marking, go over to Tower Street. And they mark year round."
Jamaica Plain, Roxbury and Dorchester
The first marker sightings in Roxbury are near Humboldt Ave, Humboldt Gardens and the Franklin Park Zoo. Neat houses, empty spaces---and tan plastic barrels. Deeper into Roxbury, a pair of lovely orange vinyl chairs mark spaces in a three decker neighborhood that borders a schoolyard. Empty spaces across the street along the schoolyard, available parking, but markers near home.
Roxbury borders Dorchester.
Black and yellow stripe taped barrels colorful and curious, mark a space in a low density area near Meeting House Hill.
Fresh, bright green folding chairs mark slush and slop on Downer Street--no labor in this claim except for running a big truck in and out of the space. A green and white lawn chair, with barcode and price tag still attached, shines in the sun, holding a space near Savin Hill.
A marker colony -- a weather beaten sawhorse, an orange cone, and surprise!-- a suitcase. It is personal, unusual, expressive.
As
I lie in the street for a good photo angle, I see a real person moving a cone--a
grizzled old Dorchester guy with silver stubble on his face. He has just parked
a behemoth gas guzzler in a space marked with a cone.
I wave him down, and walk over to him. He is wearing a dark blue sweatshirt and has crevassed, rough hands that look as if they got big from hard work. I ask him about parking in his neighborhood. He laughs. He strokes his chin and looks around impishly.
"Parking isn't so bad here because of the four corners." He points out that this block is short, and that affects available parking. He explains some of the fine points of parking around here.
"That
guy," he says pointing to the house across the street, "he rents the curb space
in front of his garage. Its not an official parking space, but he gets money
for it."
"How long do you keep marking this parking space?" I ask pointing to his spot.
He grins and looks at me, "Whatever I can get away with."
He laughs again, and points across the street.
"But my cousin lives over there. And I shovel for the guy next door. So I can't get away with much."
Tower St. runs up a hill from Hyde Park Ave. It is the closest street to the end of the Orange Line at Forest Hills. It is packed with three family and two family houses, built in the era of the street car suburbs (1870-1900). And it dead ends at a pedestrian entrance to the Forest Hills Cemetery, a Boston landmark.
The Forest Hills promotional brochure, which touts car access, and omits any mention of walking access a city block from public transportation says, "Over 99,000 people are buried at Forest Hills, including e.e. cummings and Reggie Lewis." It is the backyard of Tower St.
A walk up Tower Street reveals nice houses--there are about forty of them-- but not very fancy. Most of them would have been called lower middle income houses when they were built around the turn of the century in 1900.
It
is a typical street in Boston's "streetcar suburbs" -- Roxbury, Jamaica Plain,
West Roxbury and Dorchester -- where nine thousand builders, mostly the folks
next door developing neighboring lots, built 12,000 single-family houses, 6,000
two-family houses, and 4000 three-family houses.They were built in an age of
city expansion that preceded the car by fifty years (1870-1920). It was a carless
age, when streetcars, both horse-drawn and electric, provided transportation
for the expanding city.
Tower Street was built with walking and public transit in mind, and not much has changed about Tower St. since the late 19th century except for unexpected advent of personal cars.
In 1903, when Tower St. was young, only thirty two thousand cars were registered in the United States --one car for three thousand people. In 1923, it was one car for every ten people.
By1943 it was one car for every four people. By 1970, eighty percent of households
had at least one car, and nearly a third of 
those
households had a second car. And that was thirty years ago.
By February, 2000 Tower St. looked like the epicenter of a parking property rights political movement. Triple barrels, double barrels, personalized cones, two by four by eights on barrel, combination sawhorse-barrel-cone arrangements. Marking was emphatic and personal and --- I was told --- year-round.
Triple fortified parking spaces had conjured up stereotypical images of a mono-ethnic, working class enclave, where everybody belongs to a union, and hangs on for dear life to whatever advantage they can get, votes Democratic, and dreams about moving out to the suburbs, to a little white Cape with a lawn, a driveway, a basketball hoop --- and their very own two car garage.
My next visit proved me wrong.
It
is Saturday morning after a four inch snowstorm. People are out clearing their
cars, walking up and down the street, and leaving to do errands. Among the shovelers
are several Asians, a black man and woman, several elderly white people, a couple
of lesbians, and a thirty five-ish white guy. And they seem rather friendly
and approachable.
So, as the wet spring snow tapers off , I meander up Tower St. and do some Yoo-hoo interviews to gather comments on marking:
The average white guy says, "Seems kind of pointless to put out a marker. But hell, after an hour's worth of work I might just do it today. I moved somebody's cone once, " he says, "and somebody let the air out of my tires. But you know, if its late at night and I come home and its the last space on the street, and there's a cone, I'm going to move it. People mark spots even when there's no snow." Three people have told me this.
A young woman says, "I usually don't mark a spot, because I park around the
corner on Hyde Park Ave. 
But
since I'm parked right here in front of the house today, maybe I'll mark too.
I haven't lived here very long so I don't feel strongly about it. But I can
understand the people who've lived here all their lives."
And the cheerful black guy who has just dug out his vehicle, gives a friendly wave for the camera as he puts up both a barrel and a gargantuan two by four by eight. "You do what you gotta do," he smiles. And he drives off with his wife in their mini-van.
Boston is a Currier and Ives picture postcard this Saturday morning. Trees, roofs, cars laid white with an overnight snowbrush. Just enough to make shoveling fun. Billions and billions of snowflakes dropped at my feet, and not one of them the same. I cleared a long, narrow driveway. As I worked my way out to the sidewalk and the street I ran into a neighbor brushing off her brand new shiny Subaru Outback.
She has always seemed nice, but I know her only by my personality radar which says, "sensible, level-headed, practical and private". She has been marking a space in front of her house with a barrel I have nicknamed "The Rasta Barrel". She sometimes marks a second space with a brown barrel spray painted with blotch of pink.
I'd like to talk with her about parking spaces and marking, but I am a clueless wonder. I am nervous about the subject and have no idea what to say. So I avoid it, and try a sincere question, hoping it will lead to marking:"How do you like your new Outback?"
She smiles. "Oh its great. Fantastic in the snow." She continues to brush off the car.
"How did you decide on Subaru?" Big, big mistake.I should have picked up on the word "snow" instead of doing market research for Subaru.
"Some friends suggested it. I had never had one before." The Subaru conversation dies. She is almost done clearing. I am agenda-blinded. I want a picture of a live person with barrel for my photo-essay. I try a straight-to-the-point-casual-admiration-approach:
"Your
barrel is one of the most colorful in Boston. Can I take a picture of you shoveling
and standing near your barrel? " "No." she says hurriedly.
"But you can take a picture of my son. Painting that barrel--that was his doing. He'll be thrilled to know that somebody noticed."
With that she gets into the car, moves it to the street, puts The Rasta Barrel into the space and drives off. Maybe she knew I wanted to talk about space marking. Maybe she was in a rush, on her way to somewhere. I'm not sure. When we see each other we wave. And once, at a school meeting, we even smiled and waved.
But I never did get past the picture request. And talking about the parking spaces will have to wait for another time. After I take a refresher course in interviewing.
February 24, 2000.
Today is hot by February standards. Sixty at noon. This is spring ski weather. This is sunscreen time. Valentine's Day, just ten days ago was was wet, wild, with tropical downpours. Since February 14th snow had been turning to slush, draining steadily into the orifices of Boston's streets.
I am walking down St. John Street in Jamaica Plain. I spot a woman unloading her groceries in her driveway. Parking markers sit in front of her house. A bag half tumbles from the back end of the station wagon.
As she makes the bag upright, I call out from across the street, "I hope its not eggs!"
She laughs. Sunshine in the winter makes everyone happy. I approach for a yoo-hoo interview.
"Can
I ask you who marked that space in front of your house?" I ask, pointing to
a bright reflectorized orange cone and an upside down trash barrel.
"The guy who lives upstairs in my house."
I show her my camera and explain the parking project for UMass Boston.
She volunteers a history of parking on St. John St. "Too many students," she says. "And this is a hard street to plow. Then there's that crook in the road. We tried to get speed bumps. Illegal."
Getting back to the melting snow and markers, she says, "You put so much work into shoveling. Its terrible to be so territorial. But T commuters take spots. Not that I want resident parking. But, you know, marking makes sense. But then it doesn't."
She elaborates on the difficulty of getting her own car out of her driveway because of cars parking directly across the street. She points to a red car. It is mine. I resist the urge to confess and apologize.
"When should the markers come down?" I ask."Well," she says looking up at the sun and down at the slushy, wet street, "Now is about time."
Two weeks later the markers from the guy upstairs are still up in front of the house.
SurrenderMarking dies hard. Markers retreat to porches. They hide behind fences. They stand ready to go back on the street at a moment's notice. I walked out of house one foggy night, looking for markers. And given snow steaming up into vapor I was astounded to find markers still on the streets, and a new one had appeared -- a hockey stick. And I knew whose house it was. The street was a stage, a silent movie, a board on which markers were still in play. It deserved poetry. These lyrics came to me, and can be sung to the tune of " My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean".
Forty-five has a can made of metal,
The tan can has moved to four-six.
The barrels are moving and swapping,
A back and forth mystery thick.
A barrel is now near the fence,
Away from the space where it sat.
Four six with the tan can is gone.
And maybe will never come back.
The cone barrel marker 'oer yonder,
is Blue Boy's with Oregon plates.
A marker appears in the nighttime,
A hockey stick, chair and no skates.
This new marker's odd and surprising,
A boy playing like an adult.
No more can we make a good snowball,
Vapor gives lousy results.
REFRAIN:
Bring back. Bring back.
Oh bring back my barrel to me, to me.
Bring back. Bring back.
Oh bring back my barrel to me.
The flyer on Tower St. says: "... NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING...DECEMBER 29, 1999....RESIDENT PARKING..." It was taped onto a cement lightpost well before Christmas, and I never noticed it.
I ask people I meet on Tower St. what is going on. They think resident parking is coming in the spring, but they don't really know.
I
call the Boston Transportation Department which handles resident parking programs
for the City of Boston. It is the day before St. Patrick's Day, when I meet
a representative of the Boston Transportation Department.
He is cheery, dressed like a giant leprechaun, and doesn't know much about the specifics of Tower St., but he tells the resident parking story very well: "You get a petition, you get signatures, you petition the commissioner for the program on your street, you organize public meetings, the BTD sends representatives, there's a traffic study---its good to get your Boston City Councilor involved---the program is approved, signs go up, residents are notified, residents get stickers, the BTD enforces resident parking. "
He takes a deep breath, "And then it doesn't solve the parking problem."
"We did a traffic study on Tower Street," he says. "And you know what it showed? Most of the people going onto Tower Street are from Jamaica Plain. In Dorchester, people from North Dorchester drive to resident parking streets near the Ashmont T station. They have Dorchester resident parking stickers, so they can park on those streets. Anyone with a Jamaica Plain resident parking sticker can park on Tower St"
"It takes a lot to get a resident parking program going. It involves lots of departments. It's not instantaneous. You have to order signs, and arrange for enforcement for example and it may not be in the budget. And without enforcement" he says, "the program is useless."
Enforcement
means anything in the street, a chair, a cone, a sawhorse, a barrel--anything
except a motor vehicle---is trash.
Throughout March, the Boston Transportaion Department installed signs on Tower St. Three generous handicapped parking areas were part of the street allocation. As were some visitor spots. Nothing much changed at first. The cones, the barrels, the sawhorses stayed in place. Enforcement seemed to be non-existent or light, perhaps to give people time to get their resident stickers and to get used to the change.
Sixteen days into resident parking I visited Tower St., mid-week, mid-morning, and much of the street was vacant of cars. Some barrels and cones were still marking spots. I ran into one lady as she was coming home in her van. She moved her marker and was about to go into her house. I waved her down and asked,
"Why are you still marking a parking space now that resident parking is here?"
I noticed that she had her Jamaica Plain parking sticker. She seemed not to understand the question.
"What difference does that make. I have a parking sticker."
"Well," I said, "there are plenty of spots all around. Why do you need to put a barrel in this spot?"
"My grandmother lives with us. And I have two little kids."
"But who do you think is going to take your spot?"
I
knew that the standard answer on Tower St. was "T commuters". They were the
standard excuse for markers. I watched her face as it dawned on her that "T
commuters" couldn't be the right answer anymore. She said nothing.
I felt guilty putting her on the spot, but I pressed anyway, "The T commuters can't take parking anymore, so who do you have to worry about?"
She looked around the street. The answer was forced. It came reluctantly, and ever so slowly, "Well, you know. Other people."
I know she is a nice woman. Her husband is a hard-working nice guy. She is enthusiastically living the American dream, working hard, doing right by her family.
I dropped it there, and thanked her for talking with me.
I made her say something she did not want to say--something about herself or something about her neighbors. I realized what I had done, and didn't feel particularly good about it, but it was done.
What
should be done about marking?Marking starts out with a plausible justification, usually labor, and often becomes a game of "whatever I can get away with." The problem is that games can turn nasty. Normal traffic jousts convert into road rage. Workplace harassment converts into vengeful behavior. And righteous marking converts into enforcement by slashed tires, broken mirrors, and physical violence. The games of everyday life have no striped shirted referees blowing whistles on a level playing field. Nor do these games have clear rules, consistent enforcement, or judgment of violations.
When they work, everyday games and unwritten rules provide enormous social benefits and economic benefits, justly distributed, in real time, without the overhead of formal law. But everyday games and unwritten rules can break down in times of tension and change. When people start to disagree about what the rules should be, particularly the rules of vengeance and punishment, conflict and violence are not far behind. It is tempting to rush off and start legislating. The result is often a misconceived or unenforceable law. Formal law offers stability at the price of enforcement overhead and judicial infrastructure.
Here are a few caveats:
Watch
out if marking becomes a nasty game enforced through threats and intimidation.
At that point the game is not cute, or traditional or funny. At that point marking
diminishes the quality of life in the city. And it deserves to be addressed
clearly by the neighborhood and by the politicians who represent them.
Marking should not be glorified by politicians. I have heard of the mayors of Boston and Chicago supporting the I shoveled I mark position. This is simplistic and ignores a considerable constituency that does not believe in marking. It also ignores the potential problems of marking. Politicians can hedge and equivocate, acknowledge marking as a practice in some neighborhoods. They should position it as a subject of discussion and also acknowledge that it sometimes leads to problems. Politicians can and should take the lead in focusing citizens on creative ways to improve parking by coordinating snow clearance in winter. Tolerance, talking with one's neighbors and coordinating for the greater good are promotable civic values.
Marking should not be vilified as the selfish act of the marker. It is simplistic to ignore that people who have done their civic duty by shoveling a spot have been played the fool by people who do not shovel, or who mark unclaimed spots that they have not shoveled. Marking starts as a response to some need or frustration. It is often an expression that my labor is worth something, which shows self esteem. This is a far cry from simple selfishness. Even though marking can morph into selfishness it does start out with some real stress and frustration.
Marking should not be resolved by individuals engaging in vigilante activism.
As springtime rolls along, it is tempting to take "the law" into your
own hands and trash markers. This is not communication or negotiation. It is
a one sided diss to the
person who marks. Psychologically, the space belongs to the marker, and the
reaction to the taking can be all out of proportion to the righteous vigilante's
intent. In any case individual vigilante activism is a minefield and there are
better ways to deal with a marking bully.
And three levels of recommendations:
Let it be. Sometimes game playing relieves tensions, gives people harmless expressive outlets, and some reward for labor. If marking comes and goes, with little comment or annoyance its probably harmless and the overhead of even informal neighbor to neighbor negotiation doesn't make a lot of sense.
Turn post-snow parking into a public political issue instead of an unspoken game. If snow removal is really the problem then talking about how to shovel smart and how to coordinate local snow removal, can help a neighborhood keep roughly the same number of spaces instead of surrendering the precious few to snow storage. This is a real effort but it can work in well bounded neighborhoods where people are able to have a sense of reciprocity with each other.
Formalize parking laws for the neighborhood. If a neighborhood can't manage its parking through informal sharing traditions, it may have to organize, propose ordinances and demand enforcement of existing laws. Tower St. lost control of its informal sharing of the street and responded with marking year round. As a last resort it turned to formal law. Formal law is more stable than informal law, but it is time consuming to make and expensive to enforce. And if it may not even solve the problem.
I
was three thousand miles from Tower St. I had just walked across Spain. I had
reached Compostela, gone to Mass, handed in my walking stick, thanked my tired
feet. Sure, I had continued to collect European parking stories on the way.
I had thought about the evolution of formal law in different countries as I
trudged through pastures and Roman bridges. But I had sincerely left parking
markers behind in Boston. Then I rounded a corner and saw a chair. In a parking
space.
A blue chair marking a parking spot. I could not believe my eyes. Not in Spain. I dismissed the chair as something else, not a marker, but trash, a chair left for pickup by a repairman. The street looked like Tower St. -- a short, slight hill crowded with cars, and a huge clock tower at its base. I wondered whether it was karmic coincidence or obsession.
A day later I returned to see if my eyes had lied. There it sat---the cheap broken chair, blue vinyl back on a metal tube frame -- a marker. I took pictures just as I had done in Boston. I considered knocking on the door of the marker's house, which looked unkempt and unoccupied. A gray-haired woman, in her mid fifties, carrying a shopping bag walked up the street. I waved and asked if she lived in the neighborhood. I explained myself and my interest in this blue chair holding space on a crowded street.
At first she claimed to know nothing about it. Then she looked around and whispered,
"Gitanos." 
Gypsies.
"They live here and they don't live like everyone else." "You know." she says,
"gitanos." I went across the street and watched the spot. A few minutes later
a car parked in the space. A forty something man entered the poor-looking marker
house and came out helping an extremely old, slow moving, hunched woman, dressed
completely in black. The man moved the blue chair into the middle of the space
and they drove away.
Five minutes later, another car pulled into the parking space. A twenty something man carried three large plastic bags of light material into the house, took other bags out, and left. I could have asked each of these people about the chair, but I was wary. My instincts tell me gitanos are hated in Spain, and I might be clumped in as one of the haters. So I watched from a distance.
A few minutes later , handsome seventy something fellow, with a black beret and striking blue eyes meandered down the steet. I asked him about the blue chair . "Gitanos", he said with no hesitation. And why the neighbors don't protest? "They are like this, " he said, putting his five fingers in a bundle. "The gitanos are always together and people are afraid of them. No, they don't have a right to put a chair in the street, but no one says anything."
Spain,
whose public life is so strong, so visibly shared, so powerfully dominated by
thousands of years of histories and traditions from shop hours to fiesta days;
reinforced physically every quarter hour by ancient church bells, and by an
imposing landscape of Roman Catholic cathedrals, monasteries, village churches
and chapels.
Here in Spain I had found a person, a gitano, who dared to take a shared public space. Here I had found someone who had marked a public parking space. A gitano the neighbors said. Marking a space because he needed it, keeping it because he wanted it, taking a chance he'd get away with it, and not really caring much what the neighbors would think.
UPDATES:
January 14, 2007 --- Do chairs mean snow? Maybe in Boston they do. This picture is of marked parking spaces in Chinatown, San Francisco, California, so we're not sure what it means. Pat, of snowless San Francisco, and formerly of snowy, Peekskill, NY, saw this and sent it in....thank you!
Chairs in Chinatown parking spaces.
January 10, 2007
Here is NOAA's Boston snowfall history(1890-2002), and New York snowfall history (1868-2006), courtesy of Don Sutherland, from his fantastic winter weather website. What a resource! Don has also sent me (and now you) a snow history spreadsheet for Boston from 1890 to December 2006. If you prefer, here's the simple printout of 1890-2006. Thank you, Don!
November 13, 2006
They say its going to be a warm winter. Hmm. I have tried to predict winter snow from the snowfall in November. Boston's historical snowfall data tables seem to be nowhere on the web any longer. How ironic. Correct me if I am wrong! So, for my pleasure, and yours, I publish over a hundred years of Boston snowfall information (1890 -1999).
December 13, 2005 --
Boston. Early snow, ten inches, bitter cold. Already, I hear from a reader, parking and marking has reared its head. If you have disagreements with a neighbor about parking, be cool. Call the right people. Mayor Menino's office is listening, and the mayor has provided an excellent listing of neighborhood city hall liaisons, city councillors and local community police who need to hear your point of view.
Marking is complex and controversial, but parking bullying has no place in civic life, and public officials have to understand that they have a role in creating the conditions for coordination and cooperation among neighbors.