In December, the New York Times ran an article about the Bostonian practice of people saving parking spots after digging their cars out from a snow storm. It goes like this. The snow falls, you wake up, you grab a shovel, you free your car, you pull out of the spot, but before you drive off you stick something, perhaps a folding chair or a garbage can or an orange cone, in the parking spot that you’re vacating, thereby reserving it for yourself until you return. When you do return, you move the object out of the way and park in what is for now your personal spot. This goes on for days.
And if someone has the gumption to remove the chair or the can or the cone in your absence and park in what you consider to be your parking spot? Well, you slash their tires or pee on their snowman or commit some similar act of revenge to get your message across.
The tone of the article, in my opinion, was a New York Times feature at its worst. It 
had that arrogant, patronizing, smug, almost anthropological feel. “Why look at these quaint little Bostonians,” the sub-text sneered. “What silly and exotic customs they practice out in the provincial backwoods.”
Normally, it’s the kind of NYT article that makes me want to wretch. There are few things I find more distasteful than bourgeois cultural imperialism, something the Times’ lighter fare seems to specialize in. But in this case I found myself championing that condescending approach and wanting to pour more on myself, and not because I’m a native New Yorker. No, it’s because I live in Baltimore. And Baltimore, along with cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the article noted, engage in the same practice. It’s something I’ve been witness to and endlessly appalled by for ten winters now.
I think it is the absolute height of petulance. Talk about immature, selfish, childish, wah wah wah bullshit.
So far as I can understand it, the basic rationale is this. Well I worked hard to dig my car out and create this parking spot! I earned it, so why should someone else get it?
Well, two reasons actually. Number one, it’s a public street, not your private 
driveway. It’s a small strip of a large system of roads that we all pay taxes to maintain, and it belongs to everyone, which is why what you’re doing is actually illegal. Number two, who the hell do you think is parking in your spot anyway? Someone who didn’t “earn it?” You think the person who ends up parking there didn’t have to dig their car out, but somehow had it magically freed by the Snow Shovel Faeries? I mean, talk about self-rationalizing bullshit.
Oh, and I forgot, there’s a third reason. Because you’re an adult and you shouldn’t act like a spoiled brat.
Okay, so I got that off my chest, and thank you for indulging me. But is there a more interesting way to consider this?
An economist might observe that this kind of behavior creates an all-or-nothing marketplace. That either no one does it or everyone does it, because once some people start, demand skyrockets and value soars as consumers get caught in the shrinking supply of musical chairs.
But I’m not an economist, so I have no pithy freakanomics-like take on this. Rather, I’m a historian who is studying the demise of communities in America. So how does it relate to that?
The truth is, I’m not sure. On the one hand, I’m tempted to agree with a friend, a fellow New Yorker who thinks this behavior is the antithesis of community spirit. He too now lives here, and as we sit at the deli and kvetch, he moans about how this kind of selfish behavior represents an erosion of community because of its decidedly uncivil behavior.
However, for my friend’s interpretation to hold, you have to set a certain parameter for communities, one that presumes their rules always promote civil behavior. In reality, communities can be quite awful at times. For example, just think of all the post-Civil War communities across America that enforced racial segregation. Yes, communities create rules, that much is for certain. They’re just not always good rules.
So if I’m honest with myself, I have to say that this particular custom, which pisses 
me off to no end, may not be a sign community disintegration, but rather a grasping, gasping vestige of how local communities used to set and enforce various practices and customs for the members. It’s not a law from the larger society, and it’s not just a few rogue individuals. It’s whole neighborhoods developing and engaging in a strong cultural practice.
Shit.
Although I do occasionally fight back. Last week when a neighbor, whom I don’t particularly care for anyway, put a plastic lawn chair in a spot in front of my house that he didn’t even dig out to begin with, I picked it up, walked it down the block, and deposited it at the front door of the local Salvation Army. I didn’t give their Santa any change this year, so that’ll have to do.