signA parking spot in a Manhattan garage can go for as much as $800 a month. For that price, you could rent a room in Bed-Stuy. But there’s a wide swath of Manhattan curbside parking going for the low, low price of zero dollars. The catch? Twice a week, a street sweeper drives through and you get a $65 ticket if you leave your car in one of those free spots. The street sweeper alternates sides of the street, doing one side on Monday and Thursday morning, and the other side on Tuesday and Friday morning — on Wednesday, the Street Sweeper God rests. So one would figure that street parkers would make sure to switch sides ahead of the sweeps. But that’s not what happens.

Instead, a small, brave band of New Yorkers waits in their cars for an hour and a half weekday mornings in order to avoid the ticket but keep the same spot. The hour and a half requirement is a Kafkaesque joke played by the Department of Transportation and the NYPD — even if the sweeper comes by at 9:01, you still can’t park in that spot until 10:30. And sometimes the sweeper doesn’t even come. Still these intrepid Manhattanites wait. And wait. And wait. I wondered what these people do with this 90-minute chunk of time, and what kind of culture has formed around this bizarre ritual. So I ventured out onto the streets of the Upper East Side one Monday morning to find out.

Even though the sign on the north side of East 91st Street between Park and Madison clearly read “No Parking Monday 9:00-10:30 AM,” every spot was filled when I arrived at 9:30. I was a bit puzzled, but when a traffic cop came by to give tickets, I figured out what was going on. Any car with a driver in it got a pass, but any empty car got a ticket. There was no parking, but standing was informally allowed when the street sweeper wasn’t doing its thing. The traffic cop having passed, I sidled up to the window of an elderly gentleman in a gray Nissan who was listlessly reading the New York Post. Doug, who is retired, performs this strange dance twice every week. Not that he enjoys it one bit. “It’s one of life’s many annoyances. But I’m not paying for a garage, that’s for damned sure,” he told me. I asked if he ever gets someone else to do it for him — his kids, his wife perhaps? He stared back at me, unsmiling. I guess not. Just then, I heard a “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” sound. It was the street sweeper!

sweeper

Now the real action went down. All of the cars got out of their spots and moved to the other side of the street. The sweeper drove along the curb, pushing around soda bottles, leaves, and assorted garbage. When it reached the end of the street, I took a look at its handiwork. There was still a decent amount of debris in the street, and now some was on the sidewalk. This is why all these man-hours are being spent waiting, I wondered? With the street sweeper gone, the cars went into reverse and diagonally maneuvered back into their original spots. And now, in a scene straight out of a Camus novel, Doug and his compatriots had to wait another 45 minutes even though the street sweeper — the raison d’être of this whole parking ban — had already accomplished its mission. Although their return to the spots was orderly, Doug told me that sometimes a new car will arrive just as the sweeper is leaving and take one of the spots the waiters have been holding onto. When that happens, all hell breaks loose. “It’s pure chaos,” said Doug, explaining that in the ensuing confusion, every driver tries to grab whatever spot he can. And as for the new driver, he’s in for a rude awakening. “I’ve seen guys get black eyes over a stolen spot. More than once.” Hidden beneath the apparent code of honor among the waiters is a ruthless Darwinian struggle for territory that seems more at home in Game of Thrones’ Westeros than the Upper East Side.

Sensing that Doug wanted to get back to reading about Derek Jeter, I bade him farewell and headed up the street. While the older drivers killed the time with newspapers, younger drivers played on their phones, and middle-aged drivers talked on their phones. One such middle-aged driver was Inez, one of the few women I encountered among the waiters. Inez smoked a cigarette out the window of her Honda Odyssey as I waited for her to finish her phone conversation. “This shit sucks,” she told me. “But I work around the block at the school. And what am I gonna pay thirty bucks at some garage? No way.” There’s that hated garage again — in the eyes of a waiter, it’s the preserve of playboys throwing around cash, rubes who don’t know any better, and the weak-willed. As George Costanza once said, “It’s like going to a prostitute.” I ask her if there’s anything positive about waiting in her car. She thought and said, “I guess I talk to my family — but I’d much rather be like taking a walk or something while I do that.”

I left 91st Street convinced that this alternate side waiting ritual had no real redeeming value — it was just, as Doug had put it, “One of life’s many annoyances.” But I headed to 5th Avenue to keep investigating. There I saw a gregarious-looking older man in an Infiniti Q45 reading the Wall Street Journal. Howard greeted me warmly when I asked if he would speak to me. “You’re talking to the right guy. I’ve been doing this for twenty years,” he told me. “I’ve got a half-dozen guys, we have a little community going.” Howard explained to me that veterans of the waiting scene have figured out some tricks. “30 minutes before the sweeping period’s over — 45 tops, that’s all you need to wait to get a spot. If you’re waiting 90 you’re a sap.” July and August are the easiest months to get a spot, but by September, “you really have to know what you’re doing — above 92nd Street is your best bet.” He complained that some wealthy Fifth Avenue residents have their doormen wait for them. “You shouldn’t be able to buy your way into one of these spots — park in a garage if you wanna do that.” He also bemoaned the doctors who leave their vehicles unattended but don’t receive tickets due to a legal loophole. “You think all those doctors are doing house calls? This isn’t 1920 — they’re probably at Chipotle!”

getting out of sweepers way

Howard has a zeal for alternate side parking that’s infectious. Asked if he thinks it’s silly that so much time is spent in service of the seemingly ineffectual street sweepers, Howard replied, “Absolutely not — I want my streets clean. I love seeing tickets on cars that didn’t move for the sweeper — they deserve it. One time I saw one of those car boots on a BMW — I was in heaven!” Howard even recommended to me one of the only novels ever written about parking, Calvin Trillin’s Tepper Isn’t Going Out. “It’s the calmest half hour of my week,” he says. “My biggest decision is whether to listen to WQXR or WNYC.”

I let Howard get back to his oasis of serenity and continued down Fifth Avenue. The sounds of Lil Wayne’s “Believe Me” blared from a red Mazda Miata. The driver, Derrick, was in town for the day from Albany and was playing Candy Crush on his phone. I asked him how he felt about waiting around in the car even though the street sweeper had already passed. “Whatever — 30 minutes in the car and I have a free parking spot for the rest of the day? Sounds like a good deal to me. When this is over, I’m gonna take a walk in the park. And then who knows? Maybe Times Square.” Just then, Derrick looked at the time on his phone. It was 10:30. He, Howard, Doug, Inez, and the rest of the waiters were liberated. Derrick wandered into Central Park, having earned his freedom — and his parking spot.

If there’s one thing I’m certain of in all this, it’s that the law should be changed so that once the street sweeper passes, you’re allowed to leave your car. In fact, City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez has introduced a bill proposing just that. Mayor de Blasio expressed some support for the law, but the Department of Sanitation was not as thrilled and after a flurry of interest this summer, it’s gotten lost in the legislative shuffle. Still, even with the new rule there would be an irreducible amount of waiting. And another thing I learned in my morning among the alternate side parking crowd is that waiting is what you make of it. Most people — like Doug — see waiting in their cars as drudgery, a form of being trapped. But I was inspired by Howard’s more zen outlook. There’s a certain sense in which being confined actually frees one from the everyday distractions of modern life. Of course, that’s easy for me to say — I park in a garage.


 
 
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