Well, the passage of another winter storm is marked once more in Cambridge by the sudden appearance of metal
folding chairs in dug-out street parking spaces. A strange phenomenon, this propagation of folding chairs in the street, and it prompts a city-dweller to consider how —
and why — all these chairs make their way into street parking when it snows.
A first possibility is that these chairs sprout up,
sua sponte, out of the pavement. I have to dismiss that suggestion out of hand: paved ground is a far cry from fertile soil, and I have yet to see vegetative matter take the form of a folding chair. Another possibility is that some agitation in the earth's molten core causes it to belch up metals from underground. That white-hot liquefied metal hits the open air and solidifies, it just so happens, in the shape of a metal folding chair. Again, not so probable: there are no signs of cracking or scarring in the pavement under these chairs, no pothole so deep — even on
Hingham Street — as to suggest an open conduit into the center of the planet. And it strains credulity to think that Mother Earth could with such consistency spit up liquid metal in the shape of folding chairs, only in empty parking spaces, and only when it snows.
One has to conclude that the appearance of these chairs on the street is the result of some human agency. And the sheer number of chairs that have appeared at first suggests some concerted effort, perhaps by some band of renegade chair-placers, to scatter folding chairs around Eastern Massachusetts. But what purpose would that serve? No — there seems to be some broader, cultural dynamic at work here, by which Boston and Cambridge residents feel some urge or entitlement, when it snows, to run out into the street and put down a folding chair in any open parking space.
I have to ask, then:
Whence that urge? Whence that entitlement? To answer the first question — and I only speculate here — I suppose that when three feet of snow blanket an urban area, there arises the problem of where to put it. Inevitably, the various plows and shovelers concentrate the snow in certain areas, usually on the side of the street, where many city residents customarily park their cars. The six-foot high snowbanks on the street cause a dearth of parking spaces. Given the constant number of cars in Cambridge, and a significant reduction of space available for them to park on the street, drivers feel compelled to "reserve" spots for themselves by leaving folding chairs in them.
Now let's put aside for the sociologists the odd uniformity of method that has emerged here in "claiming" public parking spaces — how did
the folding chair become the ownership totem? why not barbed wire? a monogrammed boulder? — and ask instead my second, more significant question:
whence the entitlement?
What makes someone think that he can "own" a publicly available parking space? Cambridge's city streets are owned and maintained by the municipality, and parking spots alongside these thoroughfares are given over to the public to use. No greater privilege is accorded to one resident over another because of, say, the proportion of taxes that he pays to the city. Anyone can park in the street, so long as he has a permit or is willing to chuck change into the meter. You can't buy or lease street parking. Possession, in this instance, is
ten tenths of the law here.
What is it about the snow, then, that makes people think they can walk out and stake a morally (if not legally) cognizable claim to a parking spot with a friggin' folding chair? What basis can these chair-brandishers possibly have for excluding another car from a public parking space? One wants to apply the
Tuco Principle here and say there are two kinds of people in this world: those who put folding chairs into parking spaces to claim them for themselves, and those who aren't going to hell when they die. I suspect that a disproportionate number of investment bankers make up the former category.
Certainly those who spent an hour or more digging out the space might be able to assert a "sweat of my brow" theory of ownership. But who decides what amount of effort is sufficient to establish a claim that I "own" this parking space? Should there have been a foot or more of documented snowfall? Eighteen inches? Does there need to be any snow at all? Could I pick up a crushed beer can from a space and claim it through the summer? And there are issues of proof as well: I know of at least one instance (admittedly, secondhand, but I trust the source) in which a person dug his car out, vacated the space, and returned home to find it "claimed" by someone else's metal folding chair.
My proposal: some greater investment of time and energy ought to be required of those who would "stake out" a parking place in Boston or Cambridge. The folding chair is a starting point, but it cannot be enough on its own. If you don't want to see my car parked in "your" empty parking space, you had better be
sitting in the chair when I pull up. You had also better be in good physical condition — strong enough to deflect a Volkswagen doing 25 mph in reverse. But if you think you can just leave a folding chair out in the road and walk away, well you just lost yourself a perfectly good folding chair.
