There’s nowhere to park
Saving spots is illegal, but Lehigh Valley officials say they haven’t done much to stop the practice
Growing up in Allentown in the 1970s, Craig Farley remembers seeing lawn chairs placed in parking spots, marking the territory of neighbors who had shoveled through drifts of snow.
“That’s how it always was. It seemed to me you were putting it there for people outside the neighborhood,” Farley said. “There always used to be a respect for that. … There was never a worry that your neighbor would take your spot.”
Successive snowstorms this year, with one delivering almost 30 inches of snow in some spots across the Lehigh Valley, have exacerbated parking issues in Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton. Lawn chairs, trash cans, couches, recliners, end tables, traffic cones and lamps have been popping up all over city streets, as residents save their spots after
shoveling out.
Many residents think it’s an acceptable practice, a recent informal Morning Call poll on Twitter showed. Of the more than 400 people that responded, 55% said it was OK to save spots, while 28% said it’s not because it’s public parking. However, only 6% responded that it was acceptable and they’ve done it, with 11% saying it depends.
While the practice is illegal, police said they weren’t going out of their way to cite residents, instead stepping in when they can to defuse arguments between neighbors.
“With a lot of people living so close to each other in a lot of the neighborhoods here, the snow just piles up and there’s nowhere to go with it,” Bethlehem police Capt. Tim Cooper said.
However, “it is a public street; it’s open to anyone driving through that needs to park,” he said.
Easton police Capt. David Beitler said the department has only received one recent citizen complaint about it.
“Considering how big of a storm it was and how difficult it is to deal with that large amount of snow, it doesn’t seem like it’s been a major problem for us,” Beitler said. “You would probably think with everything going on, aside from a storm — dealing with COVID and all this — compounding it with a storm like this, you’d see a higher amount of tension between the neighbors and in the neighborhoods, and we haven’t really seen that.”
Officers try to be diplomatic and use discretion with residents, he said, but also need to make sure roads are passable in case of emergencies and to keep traffic flowing.
But tensions have risen over parking in some places.
Farley, 50, said there have been shouting matches and people moving chairs out of the way in his mother-in-law’s neighborhood near Center City Allentown, describing it as a “war zone.”
“It’s crazy,” Farley said. “I get it, everyone needs a place to park. Everything’s just becomes a lot more aggressive.”
Similarly, Joan Walko, 67, has seen arguments over parking in her Westbrook Park neighborhood in south Allentown, but none that has escalated to violence.
“Tempers do get short. With the pandemic — I call it a COVID winter — it’s been a lot going around,” she said. In her neighborhood, she has seen yellow caution tape strung between sticks of lumber stuck into plastic buckets. “Wasn’t that a hoot? I’ve never seen anything like that.”
One issue that both Farley and Walko noted could be making parking worse in the city is the number of single-family homes converted to apartments or home to multigenerational families.
Allentown officials are unofficially tolerant.
“Understanding that citywide enforcement is difficult, the city discourages the practice, but acknowledges that Allentown is a more than 250-year-old city that was laid out before the automobile and there is very little unoccupied space on the streets in our older neighborhoods,” city spokesperson Mike Moore said. “It is not easy to punish those drivers who clear out their spaces and want to make sure they have a place to go when they return home.”
This year was the first year Farley has seen an upholstered lounge chair used to save a spot, adding it was “basically taking up the room of a Toyota.”
But in the end, Walko said saving spots after shoveling out is a tradition that will probably continue year after year.
“They all know it’s a no-no,” Walko said. “If I spent three hours shoveling out there, I can understand why. There’s just no real solution to it.”