Erin Allen: Good afternoon. I'm Erin Allen and This is The Rundown. So it snowed here in there in Chicago, but the real flurries have yet to come. And when they do you better be ready to call dibs. If you're a driver in Chicago, you know the struggle of parking in the city. And if you've been here long enough without a garage, you probably at least wanted to save a parking spot to come home to after a long day of trudging through the snow. And in Chicago, dibs is how you do that. You put some items in your cleared out parking space when you leave, so no one parks there before you come back. And last winter, Adam Seltzer did just that. And he didn't just use the typical lawn chairs. He froze a pair of denim jeans and put them in a parking space outside his house, so no one could take his spot. Adam is an author, historian and Chicago tour guide. And he joins us today to talk about this unofficial dibs tradition. Adam, welcome. 

Adam Seltzer: Hi. 

Erin Allen: Thanks for being here. So you've been in Chicago for a couple of decades. But when did you start driving in the city?

Adam Seltzer: The first five or six years that I lived here, I didn't drive but then when my wife and stepson moved in, it was just a lot easier. Getting around the city with a five year old is a lot more, a lot trickier than getting around by yourself.

Erin Allen: Yeah, for sure. How does the snow affect that?

Adam Seltzer: The snow affects that because it can make it harder to find a parking space sometimes. Not all the time. But when there's been a really big snow then the plows have come through and and plowed all the snow onto the cars. It gets that much harder.

Erin Allen: Yes, correct. So yeah, tell me that around time and dibs first entered your life?

Adam Seltzer: That was when I first started recognizing them. Yeah, I would see people setting out folding chairs and things in the middle of the street, junk from their, from their place, just trying to save their spot. And what I've heard that... I thought it was kind of obnoxious until the first time I had to shovel the car out myself. Just to go to the grocery store. And then I could kind of say, okay, I can see why somebody would want to save this and save the work they've done.

Erin Allen: Yeah, definitely sounds like a very time time consuming and arduous task. 

Adam Seltzer: It can be. I was young. I had a good back and everything. It would be would be very different for somebody who maybe wasn't as physically capable.

Erin Allen: Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Get a little workout in if you if you can stand it.

Adam Seltzer: Yeah, for me. It was it was it was fine. I only I think I only set out a folding chair once or twice myself.

Erin Allen: Okay, so you started with the folding chairs. And then last last winter, you had the hilarious idea to freeze a couple of pairs of jeans and stand them up in an empty space for your car. Where did the jeans idea come from?

Adam Seltzer: It wasn't the first time I had frozen a pair of pants, I'd heard heard about people doing it back when I was a kid and one polar vortex, I thought, "hey, I'll try it." And really all you do is you get a pair of pants wet. Then set them outside when it's cold enough, within about half an hour, they're frozen enough that you can mold them into a shape. And then just they'll like stand up on their own power, like the invisible man was standing in a pair of pants. And it made for some fun photographic opportunity. So I just walked around, taking pictures of pants with nobody inside them for as long as I could stand to be out in the cold. And then the next time a polar vortex came around, I said okay, it's time to pick out the pants. And the place that I set them up wasn't even an actual parking space. It was just kind of a proof of concept that you could set them up frozen pans to use as dibs. I wasn't actually using it myself. But the picture just caught on in a big way. It's spread all over the place. But then all of a sudden that picture was on Japanese game shows and everything.

Erin Allen: Wow! Alright, so you went international? 

Adam Seltzer: Yep. 

Erin Allen: I mean, like, did you eventually use them as dibs? Like, did you keep them? I mean, yeah, tell me like...

Adam Seltzer: I kept them out on my back porch for a couple of days. As long as it stays frozen, they won't really fall apart. 

Erin Allen: Okay. 

Adam Seltzer: But eventually I had three or four pants set up on the back porch for four and more pictures because the old thing was blowing up. I was having too much fun with it.

Erin Allen: Yeah, yeah. How could you not? So you don't have like a deep freezer in the basement that you're like storing the frozen pants? 

Adam Seltzer: No no. Once... You know, I was wearing them again the next week after they've been in the dryer, but they'll, they'll... As long as it's a polar vortex they'll stay in that position really pretty well.

Erin Allen: Okay. So dibs is really a very functional thing. The goal is to keep your space in the winter, the one you shoveled and the one in front of your home. So do you have any suggestions for how to make sure dibs are actually honored?

Adam Seltzer: That's where it gets really tricky, because everybody knows that it's not exactly legal to save a parking space. I think we all acknowledge that there are extenuating circumstances for a lot of different rules. And people will certainly go a little too far with dibs. You'll see people setting up stuff from their house when there's like an inch of snow that they didn't even really have to shovel to get in and out of. Generally, it's just kind of a code of honor thing. I mean, you hear stories about people getting their tires slashed for stealing dibs. The worst I've ever actually seen as somebody riding dip thief in the snow on somebody's windshield, which is not exactly more than a minor inconvenience.

Erin Allen: Wow. Somebody's tires got slashed. I mean Yeah, cuz you know who took your spot.

Adam Seltzer: You always hear rumors of stuff like that. I don't know if I've ever seen it happen, personally.

Erin Allen: Yeah. So for the folks who do take a spot, you know, that was being held by by some dibs items, I'd seen a video on Tiktok where a guy said, you know, the courteous thing to do is to go take them and put them up on the porch of the of the house they're in front of.

Adam Seltzer: Yeah, but you have no idea whether that's actually the right house too. You know very rarely do you get that parking space right in front of your own building. It's probably... Your own building might be down the block someplace.

Erin Allen: Yeah. Right. So it's, it's convenient enough for you to save the spot, but it's not necessarily the most convenient.

Adam Seltzer: Yeah, it's not necessarily a convenient spot. 

Erin Allen: Yeah. 

Adam Seltzer: It's just a spot. That's about all you can hope for sometimes.

Erin Allen: Yeah. So I know you're a historian and dibbs isn't really an official phenomenon in a way that it would have historical records.

Adam Seltzer: Probably not. It's the kind of thing that would probably go on for years on officially before anybody writes a story about it.

Erin Allen: Yeah, I mean, well, there's been there's been stories written, but it's, you know, like, again, it's not like in any type of history books necessarily. But I'm wondering if you've looked into how it's evolved over time, or if you've been able to uncover any information about even where the locations and the geography of it.

Adam Seltzer: Really, I imagined, it's more common in Chicago historically, just because we have so much more street parking in residential areas here than a lot of other cities do. Yeah, and more and more places. Like, you know, in Atlanta, everybody's got their own parking spot. Nobody even knows how to parallel park in that city. Whereas here, it's just a part of the part of daily lives is not having your own parking space, just trying to have to find a parallel spot on the street someplace.

Erin Allen: Yeah, you know, that makes sense. There. There are a few neighborhoods for instance, like I'm from Detroit, there's a few neighborhoods there where there is no driveways. But for the most part, the vast majority of the city has a driveway for you to put your car. So yes, Chicago is one of those places where it's like, really, we didn't like when was all of this built?

Adam Seltzer: Yeah. And you can see and also you'll see it like. You know, Brooklyn would be the kind of city where you'd see that where you'd think you'd see this kind of thing more, but more and more people there just don't have cars. 

Erin Allen: Yeah.

Adam Seltzer: And they get around on public transportation more.

Erin Allen: You know, that is so true. You would think, you know, I think when I moved here, you know, I definitely was thinking, Oh, everybody's gonna be taking the train here. But there, you know, as I've noticed in the Uber when I'm on my way to go places, there is plenty of traffic in the city.

Adam Seltzer: Yeah, for sure. 

Erin Allen: Adam Seltzer is an author, historian and Chicago tour guide. Adam, thank you so much for being here. 

Adam Seltzer: Well, thanks for having me. 

Erin Allen: And that's it for The Rundown today. I'm Erin Allen and I'll be back in your ears early tomorrow morning. Talk to you then.

WBEZ transcripts are generated by an automatic speech recognition service. We do our best to edit for misspellings and typos, but mistakes do come through.