Good Show

I had guests over the weekend, including Baby Dee, who arrived from Philadelphia via Baltimore and Brooklyn. She did a show on Saturday night at Santos Party Space, downtown on Lafayette Street, with several musicians—on flute, oboe, trumpet, French horn, English horn, cello, violin, and mandolin—rounded up by the violinist Maxim Moston, who produced and arranged the work on Dee’s new CD, “A Book of Song for Anne Marie” (out—finally!—from Drag City on April 20th). The highlight of the show for me was probably “Lilacs”; the violin part makes a person feel as if she could levitate. The winds also had that effect, buoying up Dee at the harp and the piano. Maxim had said earlier, “Dee is in a heightened state,” and I thought that was a polite way of describing the state Dee was in. She has a touch of pneumonia, and was probably feverish, and should probably have been home in bed. But the show must go on. Yesterday she left for Montreal and Toronto, and then will play two shows at home, in Cleveland, before staggering on to Chicago and Cedar Rapids and Dubuque and Minneapolis and Calgary.

Dee has mastered the Muni Meter and the commercial parking hours on my street, and Sundays are free, so instead of parking we read about parking in this article in the Sunday Times. A reporter named Ariel Kaminer went around with two people who have developed different parking apps for the iPhone. Rufus Davis calls his app StreetParkNYC; his is a capitalist approach, in which a person about to leave a space advertises it and collects a small fee from a person looking for a space. The other system, by Nick Nyhan, is called Roadify, and it treats parking as a charity, encouraging people to send a text message whenever they see a free parking spot. Enter Donald Shoup, professor of parking sciences at U.C.L.A., who was consulted as to the value of these apps. What a killjoy. He said that both apps were a waste of time. Of StreetParkNYC, he said that money for parking spots should go not to the individuals who are selling spots but to the city for cleaning the streets. As for the virtuous Roadify donating parking spots to the needy, he said, “It’s too difficult for me to get my head around, because it’s just such a useless idea.” The Times went on, “Empty spaces in congested areas get filled so quickly, he said, that ‘giving’ them seems as useful as sending out a bulletin about a $20 bill that’s lying on the sidewalk.” Professor Shoup believes in meters.

This morning, having reached my car within the five-minute grace period, I found myself tempted by a free spot on the opposite (Monday/Thursday) side of the street. I could have taken that spot and sold the spot I was in on StreetParkNYC, or, alternatively, I could have phoned it in to Roadify—if I had an iPhone. It was a tight spot, though, and at its rear were two motorcycles that one would have to be careful not to administer a bump to, starting a motorcycle domino effect. I read the latest puzzling bit of news from the Vatican (in the midst of its crisis, the Holy See cries out that the Beatles were not so bad), and when I looked again a third motorcycle had made the spot even tighter. It was almost eight o'clock, and there was no sign of the Broom. The woman behind me had already gotten out of her car and was standing on the sidewalk talking to the guy in front of me when the street sweeper made a belated appearance, trying to corral the cars in back of me. One car at the top of the street moved, but then double-parked in such a stubborn way that the Broom couldn’t get past it, and by the time the street sweeper got through, it was eight o’clock, the cars were legally parked, and no one was moving. All the street sweeper could do was sweep down the middle of the street in what felt like a huff. Nobody had given him a five-minute grace period.

So the only reason that I had to start up the car this morning was that the guy in front of me asked me to back up a little, to give him some space, and I obliged. The Eclair started up O.K., though it sounds like she has a bit of cough, maybe even a touch of pneumonia.

Repent

Because it is the season for repentance, I want to get this off my chest. I owe an apology to Donald Shoup, who I implied drove a big fancy car and parked it in luxury garages and then wrote it off as a professional expense. Apparently he rides a bicycle. I tried to buy his book, "The High Cost of Free Parking," but the price ($58! on Amazon) stopped me in my tracks (though, come to think of it, I guess I could write it off . . .). Somebody else had been there before me and suggested another title: "The High Cost of 'The High Cost of Free Parking.'"

I also owe a debt to the maligned editors of the Library of America series, whose volume of Washington Irving I declined to buy ($35). I checked it out of the library before finding the little paperback of "Tales of the Alhambra," and before returning it I looked at the Chronology the scholars have so kindly provided. Irving was all over the place, including a seventeen-year stint in Europe, from the Scottish Highlands to Greece. He once crashed a party given by Dolly Madison. His birthday was April 3rd, the day I posted the piece about him. As New York's first literary hero, Washington Irving surely deserves a spot on the alternate-side parking calendar.

More on Shoup

Donald Shoup is a good writer, too, damn it. I guess I am going to have to read his book, “The High Cost of Free Parking.” He had an expression in the Times piece that I loved: the Goldilocks Principle, which (I may as well quote him) is the balance between supply (of curb space) and demand (for parking in it)—“the price is too high if too many spaces are vacant, and too low if no spaces are vacant. But when only a few spaces are vacant, the price is just right.” Much of his article is about cruising (I do not do a lot of cruising), and he touches on luck: “underpriced curb spaces go to the lucky more often than they do to the deserving.” I am always willing to be lucky, even if it’s dumb luck; more often, though, one has to create the conditions for luck, by being in the right place at the right time. Shoup acknowledges this, but he feels sorry for the guy who comes along too late and can’t find a spot: “While the car owner with good timing can enjoy his space free or cheaply for hours or days, [yes!] others who are late for a meeting or a job interview are left to circle the block, making themselves—and other drivers—miserable.” Obviously, those people should find a garage or a parking lot.

Really what I want to say to Professor Shoup is What of it? In defense of the indefensible, the defensive get belligerent. I’ll bet he parks in a fancy garage every time he gets the chance, and then writes it off as a business expense. He’d be crazy not to.

I have been thinking about the element of financial acumen that informs my parking strategy. Could I afford a garage? I don’t think so. At any rate, if I did garage my car, it would mean penny-pinching in many other areas. I will start keeping track of exactly how much I spend on the car to see if it would make sense to rent space for the car in the city. Maybe it will turn out to be a case of Depression Meatloaf. (If Shoup can have the Goldilocks Principle, surely I am entitled to Depression Meatloaf.) I used to make fun of my mother for putting so many crushed saltine crackers in her meatloaf. Her meatloaf was awful, to tell the truth; she had learned the recipe from her father during the Depression. Once our family had come to enjoy a more middle-class existence (we were nouveau middle class), she could have made a better meatloaf. She did make the switch from margarine to butter when she realized that butter was cheaper than the cheap substitute. But she never figured out that she didn’t have to augment the meat with sawdust anymore. Maybe alternate-side parking will turn out to be an eccentricity that I need no longer practice, and I will find I can house my car in a luxury garage with a swimming pool and a hot tub, or at least one of those lap pools about as big as a car (as advertised in The New Yorker) that you can set to create enough resistance to swim in place in. I’d like that.

An essential element of Shoup’s parking utopia is to invest the income from parking back into the parker’s neighborhood. So if I paid a couple dollars a week for a spot on my second-favorite block, maybe we could import some of those superheroes from Madrid who wash down the street at night with a fire hose? One Saturday morning when I lived in lower Manhattan, in the financial district, I watched out the ninth-floor window while firemen (or some civil servants with the right tools) opened the fire hydrants and let the water rush through the streets like rapids. They could do that more often.

Doomed

Uh-oh.

While I was enjoying my free parking spot yesterday, the Mayor’s aides were no doubt directing his attention to a piece on the Times Op-Ed page by Donald Shoup, the professor of parking studies at U.C.L.A. O Times, how could you? What Shoup says makes so much sense that I don’t dare repeat it here. Once the Mayor gets wind of Shoupism, it could put an end to alternate-side parking culture forever.

Let me say right up front that I feel guilty as hell for having a car in New York City. I don’t need it, it takes up valuable real estate, it pollutes the environment, and I squander hours a week either sitting in the car or plotting where to sit in the car next. But I can’t help it. I need the car to get out of the city; I adore occupying valuable real estate; I’m not the worst polluter around (the car is, after all, a Honda, and I don’t drive it to work in Times Square); and I’ve spent some very happy hours daydreaming in it.

Once, when I was still fresh in New York, my brother and I were in the back seat of a car driven by a man whom a friend of our older brother had met in a Learning Annex cooking class. In short, he was not our kind. The car was not a Cadillac, but neither was it a Hyundai. As we cruised down Macdougal Street, looking for a parking spot, he took a sudden right into a parking garage, and we lunged forward and screamed, “No! Not in there!” as if he were driving into the mouth of Hell. The horror!

Maybe it’s inbred. (Would a Gypsy pay for parking? I don’t think so.) Shoup cites George Constanza, of “Seinfeld,” who said, “My father never paid for parking, my mother, my brother, nobody. It’s like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?”

Makes sense to me.

Since the Mayor's terrible error in not suspending alternate-side parking when there was a winter storm, he has seemed really afraid of offending the parking public. He was suspending alternate-side right and left, east and west, if there was so much as a flurry. We can only hope that he didn't read the paper yesterday.