CHICAGO — Every year, Chicagoans claim their parking spots by placing random junk in the part of the street they just shoveled.
Whether you’re proud of securing the perfect space with a snowman statue or annoyed because you just tripped over another lawn chair propped against a curb, dibs lives rent-free in the Chicago consciousness.
But how did we get here?
Over the years, “dibs” has been analyzed in countless newspaper articles, enshrined in gift store hoodies and, this year, honored with its own holiday song. But it all started in January 1967, after the worst blizzard the city’s ever seen.
‘It’s The Chicago Way’
It was a “prodigious storm that came out of nowhere,” said Peter Alter, a historian at the Chicago History Museum.
Snow started falling 5 a.m. Jan. 26, 1967, and by 10 a.m. the next day, Chicago and all of its cars were buried in 23 inches, according to the National Weather Service.
It took weeks for the city to clear the thoroughfares. Most residential streets weren’t plowed, which made it hard for drivers to get anywhere, Alter said. There was so much snow, the city started shipping it to Florida on train cars, Alter said.
A fourth-grader when the storm hit, Dagmar Knorr remembers casually stepping over the 5-foot tall iron fence surrounding her school’s playground because it was buried in snow. Since school was canceled for a few days, Knorr and her classmates “had a fabulous time” building forts and having snowball fights in areas that were usually blocked off with fences.
But, Knorr also remembers helping her parents and two teenage brothers shovel out their parking spot on their unplowed residential street in Brighton Park.
“Even us kids had to take multiple breaks,” said Knorr, now 70. “It was an incredible amount of work to dig out a parking spot, and that’s when I saw people start saving their spots. It made sense because it was hard enough just driving down the street. It was like slot cars following each other’s tire tracks.”
The first written record of dibs came a few weeks after the 1967 storm. A Feb. 9 article in the Tribune described motorists “staking out their domains with folding chairs, carpenters’ horses, and anything else that may come to hand.”
As the lingering snow froze in the streets, Knorr ice skated down the middle of her block, giggling at all the nativity statues lining the street to guard people’s shoveled parking spots.
“I always thought that was a little sacrilegious, and I’m not even religious myself,” Knorr said, laughing.
Borne from necessity, Dibs offered a “pragmatic solution to an imperfect situation,” said Michael Burton, a member of Urban Spaceman, a local band that released the holiday carol “Merry Dibsmas” this year.
“There’s too much snow and not enough parking, so what do you do? You shovel your spot and claim it for yourself,” said Burton, of Logan Square.
Urban Spaceman wrote a holiday tune paying homage to dibs because they were fascinated by Chicagoan’s strong feelings about the longtime tradition.
“Our song basically just shines a light on an important strand in the fabric of our city,” Burton said. “It’s deeply ingrained in the Chicago psyche. Other places in the world have similar things, but in Chicago, we’re fiercely passionate about it.”
Dibs caught on as people saw their neighbors staking out spots, Alter said. As years passed, the tradition was further cemented on social media where stories of people’s experiences and photos of random dibs objects, like frozen pants or a fancy dining table, gained a wider audience, Alter said.
Although the practice dates to the big blizzard, using the word “dibs” to refer to the practice of reserving parking spots has been credited to former Tribune columnist John Kass. Fellow columnist Eric Zorn said his research on all articles about the practice showed Kass first used the term in 1999 to name the practice.
Reserving spots now is more popular in densely populated cities, likely because people can’t always trust that streets will be properly cleared by public snow removal services, Alter said.
“People like to say Chicago is the city that works. We muscle our way out of the snow,” Alter said. “But dibs isn’t just a Chicago phenomenon; it seems to be something that people who can’t necessarily rely on city services do everywhere.”
Ronald Yochum Jr., chief information officer for the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, told DNAinfo in 2015 that Pittsburgh Parking Chair tradition dates back several decades, also brought on in part by lack of parking on narrow roads.
“There is a sense of ‘fair play’ and respect in Pittsburgh when someone spends an hour or so shoveling off a space,” Yochum said in 2015. “I’ve shoveled spaces in front of my mother’s house and shared it with a neighbor. Everyone understood that the space was ‘ours’ until the snowplows came and cleared the street.”
Nowadays, “the whole dibs thing really bothers” Knorr because it’s not 1967 anymore and people aren’t digging their cars out of 5 feet of snow on unplowed residential streets.
“It’s getting ridiculous,” Knorr said. “If you shovel snow that’s like a layer of dust on the ground, you don’t deserve to have that spot for the rest of the winter. It’s not fair. But it’s the Chicago way. People think, ‘If we can’t get the city to do something, then we’ll just work around them.’”
As the tradition persists, Chicagoans have been forced to reckon with its polarizing energy. A reporter once asked Mayor Richard M. Daley his opinion on dibs and he refused to respond one way or the other, Alter said.
Conflict arising from people ignoring each others’ dibs claims are even mentioned in the first Tribune article to identify the tradition in 1967.
“Our emotions and our sense of decency tempt us to sympathize with the shoveler, but if it ever came to trial, the squatter would probably win out,” the article reads. “We mention the problem only in the hope that the city will finish clearing all the streets before somebody gets murdered.”
Since then, there have been a handful of incidents where people have reported slashed tires, broken windows and other forms of vandalism after they parked in a spot someone else claimed, according to a WBEZ story from 2020. Most of these incidents were reported on the North Side, in neighborhoods with limited residential street parking, according to the article.
Anti-dibs neighbors also have created real-looking but definitely fake parking tickets to stick to the household items servings as dibs.
“Dibs is kind of quaint and maybe less important now,” Alter said. “But it can cause some flash points when people are already fighting the cold and snow, trudging around in heavy coats, and all of that. Your nerves are already a bit frayed, so dibs is just one more thing to get upset about.”
Dibs has survived various attempts by the city to squash or discourage the practice.
In the early 2000s, the Department of Streets and Sanitation started removing the “lawn chairs and card tables and freaky statues” people used to claim their parking spots, Alter said. Once enough snow has melted, the city warns people to pick up their dibs or risk them being thrown away.
Some anti-dibs officials, like Southwest Side Ald. Ray Lopez (15th), have made good on their threats to toss out dibs after getting numerous complaints from neighbors.
Until the city can clear it away, the persistent clutter becomes its own art exhibit or an opportunity for cheap holiday shopping, said Burton, who was daring enough to snag barstools and a bookshelf over the years.
“When you drive down a street and see a series of lawn ornaments and low-rent sculptures lining the curb, that always makes me smile,” Alter said.
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