Few things seem to infuriate Bostonians as much as traffic, but one of those things is traffic’s flip side: somewhere to put the car when you’re done battling and honking and screaming your way to wherever it is you’re going. No change to the urban landscape takes place without an interminable struggle over every square inch of parking space, like two stubborn nations straining to resolve a border dispute.

Even as we skirmish along its edges, we tend not to think about how a vast territory was carved from public space for the warehousing of stationary cars because the war feels lost. Yet barely more than a century ago, we hadn’t even surrendered the word “parking” to cars. To a Boston resident in the late 1800s, that word might have meant something radically different: the installation of trees and greenery along city streets. When housing developers of the time advertised the ample parking around their projects, they were describing places where residents could be closer to nature, not their Hyundais.

I haven’t been able to find much historical analysis of the turn-of-the-century parking movement. It’s not as simple as one meaning of the word displacing another, and it’s not clear how widespread the use of “parking” to refer to street-adjacent greenery really was. Many of the references to this usage seem to point back to a specific urban improvement program in Washington, DC, and the Parking Commission organized to implement it. Beyond the big cities of the eastern seaboard, how many people would be familiar with this kind of parking?

What is clear is that as automobiles quickly multiplied, the vision of streets lined with greenery gave way to the demand for ubiquitous car storage. As late as 1913, residents of Arlington complained that there weren’t enough trees in the parking, but a decade later, headlines in the Globe made it clear that the “parking problem” was all about cars. As more and more car owners “insist[ed] upon riding into town every morning in their machines,” increasing amounts of public space were conceded to storing them. Even then, when there were as many cars in all of Massachusetts as there are in Somerville today, it was obvious that stashing them on public streets was awkward and probably bad. Nobody has ever been satisfied with this solution.