Labor Day and NYC Parking

People live in Manhattan so they can avoid having a car.  It costs 400.00$ a month roughly, to park your car in a garage in my neighborhod.  Your carbon footprint expands, and the whole point of living in dense urban areas is compromised by the usage of a car per individual on any scale, and certainly, on a downtown New York City scale.  Still, after schlepping for twenty years, the rituals of foraging for one's needs leads to the lure of the sort of clunkers that even CASH for CLUNKERS wouldn't trade in for.  This is the subculture of New York City car ownership: the peculiar rituals of moving your car from parking slot to parking slot, reading, dozing, eating, smoking, catching up on your reading, your phone calls,  your bills, all in the confined sphere of your downwardly mobile clunker that runs well enough to get you out of the city and back with surity.  The whole art of dodging the street cleaners, the traffic cops, and your more aggressive car parker, leads to a whole culture of life lived around a cheap car on New York's  streets, that are peculiar and unimaginable to most people in the United States.  More touching are the tales of hardened Greenwich Village car owners exchanging news, "Parking Joe on Bank Street passed away last week".  A car that doesnt serve you unless you are getting out of town- is a very particular concept to New York's Manhattan culture.  One doesnt use one's car even if one needs it, especially if you have a great Tuesday/Friday slot, or a Monday/Thursday slot.  It could mean untold hours looking for a parking spot later.

Hence, the sight of open, empty parking spots on a weekend like Labor Day weekend produces a lightness to the city's streets.  The cobblestone streets seem broader and more noir-ish.  The sky seems bluer on such days.  The streets feel quieter and calmer because they are quieter and less frenetic.  The air is sweeter for sure.  The Car People devour such a scene with a kind of desire thats hard to fathom if you havent sat for hours hovering by a potential parking spot, waiting for a street cleaning vehicle to do its job and speed by.  Labor Day weekend signals a break from parking as a survival mechanism.