Respect the Parking Chair
I have lived my whole life in the Pittsburgh suburbs, where driveways are common and parking space is more than ample. I never really saw any Pittsburgh Parking Chairs in the wild unless I was in neighborhoods closer to the city limits.
My father never used a parking chair and even now that I live in the downtown area of a small town, I’ve never had need of or really put any thought into the Parking Chair.
Three feet of snow will change that real fast.
Rarely using our garage to store one of our cars, my SUV lives in the driveway and my husband’s car lives on a side alley of the house. Come Saturday, when my husband returned home from spending the night stranded on the South Side, his parking space was buried under a mountain of snow.
Yeah, once you spend three hours digging out a space to park your car, YOU OWN THAT SPACE. Your name is proverbially on that space. You BOUGHT that space with your blood, sweat, and tears. Your literal blood from oozing blisters. Your literal sweat freezing on your brow. Your literal tears from lower back muscle spasms.
The parking chair is your way of telling people that until the snow melts, this 6 foot by 10 foot space of clear ground is yours. When you place a parking chair in that space, you’re planting your flag on uncharted land. The parking chair, regardless of what it says in the summer, during a snowstorm aftermath, says, “Behold, all ye operators of vehicles. I spent an entire afternoon excavating this spot and if ye pick up and move this chair, or nudge it even a few feet, or so much as TOUCH THIS CHAIR, there will be swift justice meted out.”
The best justice I heard was a Burgher who buried the car of the person who dared move his parking chair. This is what we call “an eye for an eye.” You take the space I dug out? You’ll need to dig for it. IT’S IN THE BIBLE.
I already knew there was a “Parking Chair” shirt over at WearPittsburgh, but there’s a lot of things I learned about the Parking Chair over the last few days.
I learned there’s a map.
I learned there’s a Wikipedia page.
I learned that some Burghers go above and beyond when it comes to reserving their excavated spaces. Reader Jennifer Ciroli says her neighbor Jeff VanderMolen has a surefire way to stop people from moving his parking chair: 
You dare to move that setup, you might as well just walk into a stranger’s house and start rearranging their living room furniture.
IT JUST ISN’T DONE.
Have your own chair to share? Send a photo of your parking placeholder (or your wacky neighbor's) to Jonathan Wander at jwander@pittsburghmagazine.com.
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Humor columnist Virginia Montanez delivers weekly posts on politics, pigeons and all things Pittsburgh via Pittsburgh magazine and her personal blog, 
Reader Comments:
A few neighbors tried the invoke the Parking Chair in Leetsdale and Sewickley. The results were amusing ... a few chairs thrown in the lawn, one on a roof, another in a tree - absolutely no respect for thee parking chair.
... I miss the city.
I, personally, also live in the suburbs and have not had to dig out a spot to put a parking chair in. However, my father was born and raised on the North Side. The street he lives on is always busy and parking is hard to come by. That chair is there year round. It amazes me that so many people respect the parking chair. And yeah, if you take that spot, your car will get buried. That's just how it's done 'round these here parts.
Yesterday, here in good old Altoona, Pa, I had the great opportunity to see one of the greatest uses of an exercise bicycle...AS A PARKING CHAIR...I laughed so hard I almost cried. What better use could there be for such a sadistic invention?
I love that you used the Portland Street Parking Tableau, but I have to make sure credit is given properly - the photo was taken by Jeff VanderMolen, who was also one of the masterminds behind the prank (along with his wife and his sister). :-)
In the just over 3 years that I have lived in the city, I had not seen this until I moved to Point Breeze. There are lots of small idiosyncrasies that I laugh at on a daily basis in Pittsburgh, including stopping at Yield signs and, well, to many more to mention.
The chair is the end all of ultimate redneck living in the city. Here's a lesson in every day life....you don't own the street, and shoveling the snow is a fact of life in the winter. Get a life.
You'd be the first to find your car hosed down with a garden hose in sub-zero temps. frozen locks? they're a fact of life in the winter.
:')
I love the blog post, and I respect the chair. In fact, today, we put one out for the first time... after being driven to near insanity this past week. I think the neighbor up the street may have one-upped us though, as the parking walker has to beat the parking chair.
Oh no, no one would be hosing my car. 1., because no one would , and 2., I have one of those neat things called a garage, because my cars mean so much to me.
As a college student I didn't have a car, but I remember walking down Muriel St on the South Side and seeing a chair through a car windshield. The storyline seemed clear to me. When I eventually got a car I always respected the parking chair.
Thank you for posting this!!! If it's in the middle of the summer, okay, fine, I'll deal.
But when someone spends half a day, and risks catching pneumonia, digging out a parking space, whether on a busy/main street or not, and that person puts a parking chair in that space, and then someone else moves your chair and parks there... then F you! If you even THINK about moving that chair then you're an automatic D.B.
Where has the regard for human respect gone?