Street Parking, Street Fighting

Like the ancient times, there are fiefdoms in the Boston area. These are controlled by roving hoards of tenants and home owners, and they're protected not by moats and drawbridges, but by desk chairs and orange traffic cones. I'm talking about parking spaces. To say it's public land available for any member of the public would only describe the letter of the law. Street justice though, has a different interpretation.

The rule goes like this: if you dig out your car, you own that parking space. In Massachusetts, this gives you the right to harm any vehicle that takes that space. I'm not saying I believe this is ok. I'm saying this is how it works. And this attitude--a sort of condonement like the person commiting the crime has no choice but to follow the rules of the street--is the attitude you'll encounter in a few places in Massachusetts and especially Boston. The Globe puts out a couple of articles on this every winter and this one describes it quite well.

When I lived in Somerville a couple of years ago, I went on a vision quest to dig out multiple spots and purposely not save them. The idea was that everyone would get that sense of communal pain. Everybody's got to dig out a space at some point, and once they're all dug out? Plenty to go around. Things seemed to go well for me for the first month or two, but eventually the time came where I dug out a space, and came back home to find that someone had claimed it for him or herself--without having earned it. Well, now I understood the rage. I tossed the cone on to the sidewalk and attached a note saying "you didn't even dig this out!" I saw the cone sitting on a neighbor's porch a couple of days later, making me feel like a 9 year old who caught an adult doing something bad. The sad reality that people will try to get away with this stuff when nobody's watching is definitely something to ponder during those cold, close months of New England winter. And at times, even during the summer.


Here's someone saving a spot on August 1. There is probably an excuse or justification in their heads for this behavior, but the purpose of this blog is survival, not change. Know how to operate so this just annoys you (rather than destroys you).

Your strategy? It's best to save your spot after the first significant snow and observe your neighbors...see if anyone else is getting uppity about their spaces and saving them. It can literally vary from one street to the next. If you're in the right kind of block, maybe you don't need it. (I needed it in South Boston, but didn't need it in Jamaica Plain. On the street I live now, one end you definitely need it and the other end you definitely don't.) When the first significant snowstorm arrives, be sure to grab a spot you don't mind having for the rest of the winter. When you dig it out, leave your old plastic porch chair in its spot, and this place is yours for the next 6 months.* If you don't have an old porch chair, you must acquire one. Make sure it's properly weathered or you'll look like you're from out of town and you will have failed this blog.

* Yes, I said 6 months. With the exception of the occasional summer saver, most spots are saved until the last flake of snow has melted. You'll know when everyone else starts picking up their cones.

Virtual Waiting Room

It sounds like a scifi blunder, but the Virtual Waiting Room is a real thing, and it is an agony reserved for outsiders and insiders alike--all incarnations of Red Sox fans. The Red Sox ticketing nightmare in Massachusetts requires more than just one entry on this blog, so we'll just stick with the ticketing purgatory of the VWR. The demand for tickets is so incredible that there are lotteries over chances to purchase them for certain games, like Yankees games or opening day festivities. Regular tickets however, have no lottery. Instead, it's you vs all the ticketbrokers and their newfangled products. The web gets clogged when they go onsale, and I heard from an unverified source that Comcast and RCN (the local cable providers) rent nuclear-powered equipment from MIT in order to keep the entire interweb from hitting a giant 404 error.

When tickets go on sale, you have four options, each bleaker than the last.

• Dial their 800 number, which gets so busy it may not even connect to get the busy signal. This will take hours.
• Go online and visit the Virtual Waiting Room. It's a page that automatically refreshes every 30 seconds in case you can advance in line. If you open one internet window (no tabs, etc) and responsibly wait by your computer for each 30 second refresh, you will die of dehydration in 48 hours and sometime after your death you'll advance in line only to find out that everything's been sold out.
  • You can also open as many tabs as you can fit on your screen. Don't lose heart, but it's still going to be at best an hour or two before you advance. Can you stand sentry over 80 tabs for that long?
• While you're waiting, you can go onto craigslist or ebay and see that people are getting in somehow and immediately selling their wares for a profit. It's pretty sickening for an honest RS fan.
• Skip it and see a minor league game. (This secondary market, you may be surprised, also gets sold out.)
  

The last option of course is like a trick question. If you skip it, then you don't really love the Sox, because the Sox are all about suffering, and even though the Curse is now over, a Sox fan should seek out new and interesting ways to fail. The VWR fulfills this dream like no other fire sale can.

September 1

While the date may seem innocuous in other places, even evincing pleasant images of barbecues or the excitement of a baseball season's twilight, September 1 is a giant on/off switch in Boston. The metro area boasts something around 60 colleges and universities, and the student population lives in the multi-family houses that take the place of apartment buildings in this part of the country. You'd think things would get more crowded with a flood of tourists over the summer. But for natives, it's the other way around. On September 1, the population bulges with students and sucks the last breaths of summer to bring on not only a harsh winter, but all those kids.

The way Bostonians view the arrival of September 1 is best explained through a graphic by Leif Jones:



The most significant pivot on this date is the flipping of apartments. I can't verify this, but about 98.7% of all apartments in the Boston area rotate on September 1. In some ways it sounds like a massive collusion amongst owners, forcing the renters into a crowded market for higher prices. The competition is so fierce that you're forced to pay first, last, security, realtor's fee, and about anything else you can think of in one large payment minutes after deciding to live the next 12 (or 9) months in one space. I've lived in a number of apartments in the Boston area, and if you want to have fun with a real estate agent, show up on August 10 and talk about finding an apartment for September 1. I did this a few years in a row, and each time--with different agents--they broke out into a sweat and told me I was too late. Every time, I got an apartment.

Still, you'd be better off sleeping on someone's couch and grabbing something October 1, when prices ease up a bit and you're not milling around someone's living space at the same time as other prospective renters. If you don't, you're in a lifelong spiral around this date. Even if you're someone who's not moving because of anything academic, you're subject to this date because it's the starting point of a life of renting. The first year, you'll rent on September 1 for 12 months. So guess what? Next year when you're looking to switch apartments because you're sick of dealing with your roommate's? When it's time for a new apartment you leave when your lease has expired, again hinging on the same date as last year: September 1.

Directions

Getting around Massachusetts and particularly Metro Boston can be a real challenge. Arrow distributes a 264-page guide of the Metro Boston area (and similar guides for the Cape and Western Mass). This is a sacred, spiral-bound piece of driving equipment necessary for any adventure on the state or city thruways. Boston is famous for having roads built on cow paths, because of the spaghetti-bowl look of them. However, the truth is even more complicated.

To me, a quick look describes it. Below is New York city with its famous grid system, all blocks squared off nicely and even worse, they're numbered in order.


And Boston:


Believe it or not, the two screens above are the same resolution. Boston is a tangled web. When you consider how much is under construction at any given time, the headache just gets worse. Because of its complexity, a Bostonian can (needs to) spout out multiple sets of directions to one particular destination. He or she can discuss the pros and cons of traffic conditions, lights, and construction, too. When I first moved to Boston, I witnessed several of these brain cramps as some Quincy natives spoke at length about driving from one part of town to another (in Quincy). It takes skill and a vast knowledgebase to comfortably navigate these roads, memorize all the one-ways, and understand how a wrong turn can cost you 10 or 20 minutes before you can turn around and make your way back. Once I began to understand some of these roads, I found discussions like this stimulating.

If you can speak for 30 minutes on the different ways of going from Central Square to the North End, you've got hard-earned respect.

Boston Left

Ever heard of the Jersey stop? Massachusetts has its own patented maneuver as well: the Boston Left. Yes, these moves are technically illegal (failure to yield), but someone new to the area must be well-versed for survival.

There are two types of lefts that qualify as Boston ones. The first is in a T intersection, where a driver is trying to turn left onto a well-traveled (i.e. crowded) road. The only way this can be done in a dense metropolis like Boston of course, is to go halfway and block one lane of traffic. Whether you are the driver or the victim being blocked, remember that you have the right of way.

The second type of Boston Left comes at a cross intersection. The situation is otherwise much the same: there is simply too much traffic to nicely make a left turn. No matter what, there's going to be traffic. So, the only way to complete a left turn is to cut off some sort of artery and block people from moving forward. For definition 2, this means waiting until a green light at the intersection, and flooring it--the driver cuts off traffic that is coming from the opposite direction. This squeezes in a quick turn before people are really moving. One driver pulling a Boston Left is acceptable, two drivers doing this is pushing it, and three means you're justified in getting mad.