Parties, Parking and Peons
The finely dressed woman drove to the door of the hotel on New York’s posh Upper East Side. She stepped out, handed her keys to the attendant and walked in. Not until two hours later, when she sought to retrieve the vehicle, did the woman learn that the hotel did not have valet parking, let alone an attendant. She had given her car to a passing stranger, who drove away pleased with her generosity. The woman never saw the car again.
During this holiday party period, the story is a useful reminder for Southern Californians that valet parking is not a universal right. Not yet. As shocking as it may seem to many in the Southland, not everywhere in the world has felt the need to create a class of hired hands to perform the tedious, time-consuming and potentially tricky procedure called parking.
In some places, it can now be revealed, people who drive their cars to a party are the very same ones who park the car in one place for the duration of the festivities. They look for a spot. They put the car there. They lock it. When it’s time to return home, they unlock the car and drive away. No one tips them. They need not wear vests. They must open their own car doors. But somehow life continues.
Valet parking, of course, is not unique to Los Angeles. Indeed, in Tokyo, where would-be auto buyers must document a parking spot before police will permit a car purchase, the lack of parking sees valet drivers simply guiding the vehicle around the block for the duration of a car owner’s appointment. And back when carjacking was a criminal fad, some East Coast malls briefly offered valet parking to suburbanites worried about hiking across several acres of pavement alone.
But Los Angeles has perfected valet parking almost to a right. There is a perceived need among well-to-do and not-so-well-to-do drivers for whom time is money that hailable taxis are unavailable, servants = status and locating your own parking spot is menial. L.A. has a ready supply of struggling young people, often immigrants. They’re willing to endure long, odd hours of curbside tedium to possibly acquire paper money tips for the brief privilege of placing their backsides on the very same warmed leather that more famous behinds occupied. They can pretend to own a $60,000 vehicle while moving it a half-block.
Unlike some California fashions -- think wearing sunglasses on foreheads -- this royal right has yet to seize other parts of the land. There, believe it or not, many homeowners actually do their own gardening and pool-cleaning, and if they own teenagers, leaf-blowing and mowing. Also, quaintly, even educated people park their own cars as if they were self-reliant and think nothing of it. Perhaps those sad sots will catch up some holiday season.
