I want to be clear about something before we get into this: I believe in dibs. I have always believed in dibs. You shovel a spot, you earn it, and the chair you put there is a sacred covenant between you and the city. My father believed in dibs. His father believed in dibs, though he used a sawhorse instead of a chair because he was, in his own words, “not running a furniture store.” The system works. It has always worked. What Walter Novak is doing on the 3300 block of South Lowe is not dibs. What Walter Novak is doing is imperialism.

Novak, 62, a retired electrician who has lived on the block for thirty-one years, currently has fourteen chairs deployed across eleven parking spots. The chairs include four plastic lawn chairs (two white, one green, one of indeterminate original color), two metal folding chairs, a wooden kitchen chair missing one spindle, an office chair with a high-vis vest draped over it, a beach chair, a step stool, and what appears to be a vintage barber’s chair that Novak says he “found.” He could not or would not say where.

“Every one of those spots, I shoveled,” Novak told me from his front porch, where he was drinking coffee and surveilling the block with the focus of a man who has confused parking with warfare. “Maybe not this year. Maybe not last year. But I shoveled them.” When I pointed out that the dibs system traditionally covers the current winter and that it was, at this point, late March with no snow on the ground, he looked at me the way you’d look at someone who just put ketchup on a hot dog. “Dibs don’t expire,” he said. “Show me where it says they expire.”

He has a point, technically, in that there is no law governing dibs in Chicago. The city has historically taken a position best described as “we’d rather not,” acknowledging the practice without endorsing it and occasionally sending Streets and Sanitation crews to remove chairs after a reasonable thaw — usually around forty-eight hours post-snowfall. The forty-eight-hour guideline, however, is a suggestion, and Novak treats suggestions the way the lake treats seawalls.

His neighbors have opinions. “It started with two chairs after the January storm,” said Denise Kowalski, who lives three doors down and has been parking two blocks away since February. “Then he added a third for the February storm. Then he just… kept going. One morning I came out and he was carrying a rocking chair down the front steps. A rocking chair. For a parking spot.” She paused. “I don’t even know where he’s getting the chairs.”

I asked Novak this question directly. He said some were from his basement, some from estate sales, and some were “contributions” from allies on the block — neighbors who support his territorial claims and have, in his telling, delegated their dibs authority to him. “It’s like a coalition,” he said. I asked him if he meant a cartel. He did not find this funny.

The alderman’s office has received four complaints about the situation, according to a staffer who asked not to be named because “this is a dibs thing and I live in this ward.” The office’s official position is that the matter falls under Streets and Sanitation jurisdiction. Streets and Sanitation’s position, per a spokesperson, is that “the department typically addresses dibs markers following a significant snowfall event” and that “no significant snowfall event is currently forecast.” Translation: not our problem until it snows again.

Look, I get it. I’ve been in this city long enough to know that parking is personal. You don’t touch a man’s spot. You don’t move a man’s chair. These are the rules, and the rules matter. But there’s a line between defending your spot and colonizing a city block with mismatched seating, and Novak crossed it somewhere around chair number six. Dibs is a pact. It’s not a lifestyle. Somebody get this man a garage.