Cars double-park on Payson Avenue in Inwood to make room for the street sweeeper.
PHOTO: Sean Leahy

By Sean Leahy and Ron Brownlow

The tow trucks are coming!

Doors slam, engines rev, and by 11:30 a.m. every car on West 115th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive is double-parked on one side of the street. Except Keitha Fine’s.

Fine’s car has a flat. So she stands by it in the freezing wind, alone on the north side of the street, and waits for the wrecker.

Every morning thousands of New Yorkers scurry to their cars to make way for the street sweeper. Since finding an open space in a crowded city with 1.9 million registered vehicles is a nail-biting proposition, many opt to spend the half hour or more it takes the street sweeper to make its rounds parked illegally on the opposite side of the road. 

In a practice known as alternate side parking, drivers can park for free on numbered streets in New York City, except for a one-and-a-half-hour period twice a week when street sweepers clean the street. The city cleans one side on Mondays and Thursdays, and the other on Tuesdays and Fridays. There is no cleaning on Wednesdays.

“The main problem with [alternate side parking] is that you take out an hour of your day,” says Gordon Scarritt, a therapist who lives on the Upper West Side. “You’ve got to waste an hour and a half two times a week.”

Parking illegally can get you a $45 ticket. Traffic cops usually make an exception for cars that double park to avoid the street sweeper, but they’re less likely to show mercy on motorists stranded on the side of the street slated for cleaning. 

Which is why Fine, a visiting scholar at New York University's Center for European Studies, isn’t looking forward to her encounter with the tow truck driver. “I hope he’s nice,” she says, shivering.
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Seinfeld wrote an episode on alternate side parking, in which George took on the job and crashed Jerry's car.
PHOTO: AP Photo Archive

"He's this guy in the neighborhood, parks cars on the block."
— Jerry Seinfeld, "The Alternate Side"

Read the entire transcript...

Talk about on demand! Jerry Seinfeld built this garage on West 83rd Street just for his own cars.
PHOTO: Ron Brownlow

Read about the garage...
Look at the blueprints...