December 3, 2007
parking chair
On Melwood Avenue, in North Oakland. In Pittsburgh, you can hold a parking space in front of your house with an old chair. Somehow nobody steals the chair, either. This one was particularly broken down, and I’m not sure why it had a bit of clothesline tied to the back. The back was the one part that still seemed to be holding together. Maybe it was like tying a string around a finger to remember something? I wonder what chairs have to remember.
[Comments are closed, but for more discussion of parking chairs, and a link to a parking chair t-shirt, you can visit the Spreadshirts blog.]
comments
Wow, Elizabeth, and here I thought that the Ancient and Sacrosanct wintertime custom of Dibs was exclusive to Chicago (where it is practiced and honored citywide).
A few years back Hizzoner Da Mayor Richard II came in for a little (very little) flak when he took to task those who would remove a space-holding chair from its spot on a public street, intimating that the custom of Dibs enjoyed the status of common law.
It was on a day around that time, while walking from home to an El stop, that I phoned a Dallas friend to deliver a ten-minute piece of reportage describing the various Dibs tableaus I passed. Maybe this will be the winter to revive and record the performance and share it online with all of my new friends.
May I purchase parking chair?
In Baltimore you can do that when it snows. Of course you have to be the person that shoveled out the space.