After a heavy snow, digging out your parking spot and marking your territory with anything you can get your hands on, otherwise known as dibs, is a Chicago winter tradition. Off top, “Dibs” may sound completely illegal to most people, and that’s because it is!
When it’s warm out, you’ll probably never give Dibs a thought. But during Chicago’s long winters—when the weather is so frigid that it feels like the violent Lake Michigan winds are ripping layers of skin off your face—many Chicagoans shovel out parking spots before the plows have arrived, and as a result feel they’ve “earned” the spot.
Ever since I can remember, this winter season parking system has fostered an unusual amount of respect (or, perhaps just fear) for an unwritten rule nearly all Chicagoans obey: “don’t mess with Dibs fam”.
It’s observed by mostly everyone in the city, and it’s what has kept the wild, outlawed system of Dibs alive for decades.
According to Peter Alter, a resident historian at the Chicago History Museum, that original system of snow meeting labor with entitlement as a catalyst comes, appropriately enough, from the Big Snow of 1967. That storm, in which a record 23 inches of snow fell, appears to be when Chicagoans finally felt they had the right to the parking spaces they cleared.
It makes sense, in that that snow was notable not just for being deep. It was heavy, too, and it fell after the city had seen record January highs in the 60s only two days before.
Alter cited a Feb. 9, 1967, Tribune editorial with the headline "Post-Blizzard Etiquet [sic]."
"The way the references were written, this was a new thing," he said.
"Does an automobile owner have any special rights to a parking spot which he has spent hours shoveling out?" the Tribune states. "Motorists in a good many parts of the city obviously think they do, because they are staking out their domains with folding chairs, carpenters' horses, and anything else that may come to hand."
Dibs has existed in some form since at least 1967, documented by a Chicago Tribune article covering the record-setting Chicago blizzard of ‘67 that described motorists in the city “staking out their domains with folding chairs, carpenters horses and anything that may come to hand.”
The official term was coined in 1999 by a Tribune columnist who pointed out that, at the time, you could even straight up call Dibs on a spot you hadn’t even shoveled yet—you’d claim it on a government-sanctioned website, ChicagoShovels.org. It’s really not all that shocking if you understand typical Chicago culture; tensions unresolved by the city of Chicago far too often result in intolerable levels of inaction.
But it’s just one example of a decades-long structure on city parking laws—one that, whether you love it or hate it, sets everyone off for no good reason.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-dibs-chicago-parking-photos-photogallery.html#nws=truehttps://www.davidjosiah.com/culture/2021/2/27/history-of-dibs-is-it-a-chicago-thing
