City Parking? Not My Cup of Tea

A trip to a Pittsburgh coffee shop in 1999 set me back $200

How much would you pay for a cup of tea?

It’s a question I had to ask myself during the spring of 1999. Although tea has been used as a commodity for centuries, the quarter pound of Ceylon loose leaf tea that I bought in April of that year should have been coated in gold.

I was 22 and a student at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. On a spring afternoon, three of us left campus in my dark green 1998 Plymouth Neon. We headed into downtown Pittsburgh. The mission? To buy a small quantity of tea at Nicholas’ Coffee Co. on Market Square en route home to Washington County.

But less than two hours after we left western Pennsylvanian Amish County, I was more than $200 in the hole. No, I didn’t spend it on tea. Most of that money went to the City of Pittsburgh.

Tea Time

Nicholas’ has been serving the bulk ingredients to make hot beverages for more than 100 years. I’d fallen in love with the shop at an early age.

Tea was a big part of my life growing up. I enjoyed putting water on the boil and scooping the leaves into the strainer of one of our McCormick teapots. I drank out of a mug, not a cup of tea. Dad was a tea connoisseur, but it was a family friend who first introduced me to Nicholas’ in the mid-1990s. I became somewhat of a regular. In fact, I had a standard order. In quantities of a quarter pound each, I would buy Ceylon; Early Grey; Orange Spice; and Oolong. Sometimes the Oolong would be exchanged for something else, such as Gunpowder. The trips were almost always on Saturday morning.

In every way, the trip I was making that Friday afternoon in 1999 was breaking my normal routine. I wasn’t alone. Dana, who was my college girlfriend, and Megan, a mutual friend of ours, came with me. We weren’t in any hurry to get home for the weekend. In fact, we stopped by McConnells Mill State Park to take in the waterfall on Slippery Rock Creek.

But we didn’t stay there long. Just before 5 p.m., I was parallel parking my car along a side street near Market Square. I figured I could drop a couple of dollars into the meter and that would satisfy our needs while we got our tea. Then, we walked to Nicholas’. The purchase was uneventful. We left with our tea and walked back to my car.

It was gone.

Parking Problems

In my older age, I’ve been able to laugh at myself. But that night, I started to panic. No cell phones in those days. The sun was starting to set. Rain was starting to fall. None of us had any money. And at that point, I thought my car had been stolen.

We walked into a bar very near the space where I parked to get out of the rain. I asked if I could use the phone because my car was gone.

“Oh yeah,” a bar patron who spoke up said. “I saw them take it.”

Oh yeah. I saw them take it.
Pittsburgh bar Patron

Still misunderstanding the situation, I could feel myself jumping through my skin. I wasn’t alone.

“What? You saw someone steal his car and you didn’t do anything?” asked Megan.

“No,” the bartender said. “It was towed. Can’t park here after 5. But you can fight it. The construction work is blocking the sign.”

I never found a sign saying I couldn’t park there, although I did find one around the block. Besides, fighting the ticket was the least of my worries. I had no idea where my car was.

With a phone book from the bar, I found a number that eventually led me to a city impound lot on Liberty Avenue. It was a couple of miles away and it was getting dark. As nice as the bartender was, he stopped short of allowing me to make a toll call. The bar didn’t have a pay phone.

So, we decided to walk to the William Penn Hotel lobby. I stopped by the ATM just outside PPG Place and cleaned out my bank account.

Pot of Gold

Rain was coming down by the time my dad arrived in his Jeep. Dana and Megan had been making the most of a bad situation and were having fun in the hotel lobby. But I was pacing. At 22, my car meant pretty much everything to me. I was afraid something bad was going to happen to it. It was a relief to climb in the Jeep and head toward the lot.

The rain had let up by the time we reached the lot, but it was pitch dark. The woman behind the counter asked for my registration information. That was in the car, so I had to weave my way through other vehicles in a dark city lot and squeeze into mine to get the paperwork out of the glovebox. Once I was back, she calculated the total.

More than $150. As I was paying the bill, my dad turned to the woman and said: “You know, it wasn’t you, but the city just towed the car of a 22-year-old college student who had come into town to patronize a tea shop.”

This is true. But nothing came of it. I pulled my car out of the lot and took Megan back to her place in McDonald. Then, I dropped Dana off in Chartiers Township. I went to my childhood home in Canton Township. It was late. I was tired.

The next morning, I had the electric kettle on the boil in my dad’s Washington law office. Dad was sharing my story with his accountant as I arrived with my first cup. The accountant made some comment that it was a very expensive cup of tea, and he hoped it was worth it.