John Seabrook | Stories | Elegy for a Parking Space

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Elegy for a Parking Space

From The New Yorker
February 22, 1999

For thirteen years, I was part of the nomadic community of people who "garage" a car on the streets of Manhattan. The rhythms of parking shaped my days, my nights, and my weekends. Arriving at 10:30 A.M. on Monday to insure a spot when alternate-side parking began, at eleven, I'd sit in the car reading the paper, writing letters, or sharing information on the hard-to-predict movements of traffic cops with the other people who parked on my block. (Like salmon returning to their birth rivers, people who park on the street tend to be drawn to the same blocks.) A spot secured on Monday didn't actually have to be relinquished until Thursday, but to be sure of a Friday spot you had to move the car across the street on Tuesday. Extending a weekend on Long Island until Monday meant missing the chance for a Sunday-night spot--always iffy, but doable--and that meant, almost certainly, having to pay for a parking garage or settle for a meter, which would require leaving the house every hour to put quarters in it. Of course, one could not actually use the car, once parked, except on weekends.

Some might argue that the time and energy one invests in looking for free parking is worth more than the three hundred dollars or so a month it costs to keep a car in a parking garage. But for me parking on the street was worth it. I knew the sudden joy of spying that rectangle of heaven that I could lay claim to simply by having a car, and I knew the devastation of seeing the car right in front of me grab it. Parking for free made all the other usurious New York City expenses more bearable (such as the unincorporated-business tax, which is the penalty that the city makes the self-employed pay for not being a corporation). Even a fifty-five-dollar parking ticket is a lot easier to swallow when sweetened by the thought of what a monthly garage costs.

But life is what happens to you while you're busy looking for a parking space, as John Lennon sort of said. When my wife and I had a child, I convinced myself that it was time to upgrade to a more comfortable and reliable car than the 1987 Toyota Land Cruiser that I'd bought, with eighty thousand miles on it, in 1992. I felt we needed something that wouldn't give the kid Shaken Baby Syndrome simply driving down Greenwich Street. Parking on the street had meant not having to worry about getting a new car.

In order to discourage potential thieves, I kept my car as messy as possible--old newspapers, McDonald's wrappers, clumps of pennies gummed together with spilled Coke, empty bottles that rolled out from under the front seats when you hit the brakes. Whatever temporary loss of status I might have suffered by arriving in certain driveways in Connecticut in a semi-beater, I would regain when I informed people that I parked my car on the street. Out-of towners, especially ex-New Yorkers, love to congratulate themselves on not having to pay three hundred dollars to park their cars, and finding out that I kept a car in the city for free was usually a blow. You mean you park on the street? And nothing happens to your car? Nope--well, nothing serious. In all the years that I garaged my car on the street, I got some dings and, once, lost a radio, but it was a crummy radio.

As I drove our new car, an Audi wagon, home from Zumbach, the dealer, to the expensive garage I would be parking it in, my perspective on New York City traffic changed drastically. Cabdrivers with whom I'd once gleefully jockeyed for position now seemed to be driving like madmen. Stay away from my car, I said out loud several times. After two days of driving in the city, it was a relief when we packed up for the recent holiday weekend and headed to New England. Only on crossing the Henry Hudson Bridge did I begin to unwind, and not until I arrived in the bucolic spaces of Vermont was I able to begin to enjoy owning a new car.

On the following morning, the warm winter sun was twinkling fiercely on my car's Santorin-blue mica finish. The snow on the roof of the house began to melt. "Usually roofs around here creep," a resident of the village later told me. "But this time they shot." A week's worth of heavy snow and ice came whizzing down, projected five or six feet away from the house, and landed directly on top of the car. The weight stove in the roof, put a "bird bath," as the body-shop guy called it, in the hood, and dented the car in other places. I had insured the car against the usual urban threats, theft and vandalism, but I hadn't thought about thawing snow falling off a roof in Vermont. I had a tense two-day wait for the insurance agent to open to find out if I was covered.

So now I have no car. It's back at Zumbach, getting a new roof. It turns out that I am insured, although I'm out the deductible and I'm paying the garage for space I can't use. I see beautiful parking spots around the neighborhood, but they no longer delight me. They mock me.

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