Long-Ago Snow - New York Times
December 31, 2006
Long-Ago Snow
By MITCH KELLER
ON Monday, Jan. 18, 1909, New Yorkers woke to a city transformed. A weekend storm of snow and sleet had left everything — the biggest trees and the smallest bushes, the trolley wires and street lamps — coated and gleaming with ice, as if made of glass. It was, wrote a reporter for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “as if the fairy queen of childhood days had waved her magic wand and transported us to the kingdom of ice and snow.”
“In Prospect Park,” the reporter continued, “the scenes witnessed were beyond description. Nothing like it has been seen for years, and thousands of persons walked through a perfect garden of wonder.”
We have a good idea what Prospect Park looked like that day because one of the thousands of Brooklynites who went there was a serious amateur photographer named Clinton Irving Jones. Using a 4-by-5 view camera, Mr. Jones took carefully composed photos of the scenes before him. They captured the ice sparkling on the trees like tiny holiday lights, the weaker trees bending under the burden of the ice on their branches, the tracks of the people who went to see it all.
In these photographs, which are on display at the Underbridge Pictures gallery in Dumbo through Jan. 28, Mr. Jones recorded the friendlier aspect of a winter storm, its visual beauty in a pastoral place. But his photos did not, of course, reflect the larger reality of that storm.
With the exception of the rare power blackout, nothing disrupts life in New York like a winter storm. This was especially true a century ago, long before conveniences like the Weather Channel and 24/7 takeout, and devices like computers and cellphones that make instant communication possible.
In those years, even a relatively modest storm like the one that transformed Prospect Park into the proverbial wonderland — several inches of snow and sleet, a little rain mixed in, followed by an ice-up — might play havoc with the lives of New Yorkers. When a warm home depended not on the turn of a thermostat dial but on the availability of coal at the grocer’s, and when milk was delivered each morning door to door, the inability of horse-drawn delivery vehicles to move about could mean days of hardship. Nor did it take much bad weather to disable the overhead wires that provided telephone and trolley service, or to seriously complicate the efforts of horse-drawn fire and rescue vehicles to reach people in need.
DURING the storm in January 1909, for instance, beyond the peaceful confines of Prospect Park, ice-laden trolley wires collapsed in many parts of the city, badly interfering with streetcar traffic and clogging up the streets. Horse-drawn trucks kept getting stuck, further hindering the streetcars, because the horses couldn’t advance in the ice and snow; at the Williamsburg Bridge, The Eagle reported, “The horses attached to a truck fell down and the cars were blocked from 7:35 to 7:55.”
In Long Island City, Queens, telephone wires collapsed onto trolley lines, causing “a big electrical display” and a traffic jam. In Manhattan, ice on the third rail was believed to have caused a short circuit that set fire to a car on the Sixth Avenue el. Back in Brooklyn, according to The Eagle, the weather “put almost the entire fire alarm system in the borough out of commission and created grave danger.”
Emanuel Brutto, a 30-year-old ship’s cook from Barbados, was found frozen to death beneath a tarpaulin in a truck on South Street. The New York Times reported that a barge captain had died of “apoplexy” during the storm, a condition caused, his crew said, by “anxiety for the safety of the barge.”
Then, as now, New York had a conspicuous population of homeless people, many hundreds of whom turned to the Department of Public Charities for shelter that weekend. “Practically all the men and women who applied for shelter were poorly clad, some miserably,” The Eagle said, “and many of them were suffering with frostbitten feet and hands.”
All things considered, New York’s winters are far from arduous, but the city has been struck by plenty of big storms over the years, many of them notable for one reason or another. The storm of last Feb. 11-12 brought the biggest official snowfall in the city’s history, 26.9 inches. The storm of Feb. 9-10, 1969, almost cost Mayor John Lindsay the next election because of his failure to clear the streets of Queens.
After the Blizzard of ’61, Mayor Robert Wagner banned cars in New York for almost a week, sealing off the city with police checkpoints. During the Depression, storms like the Blizzard of ’35 meant government-sponsored snow-removal jobs for thousands of unemployed men. The cleanup of the Blizzard of 1920 included the bizarre sight of soldiers from the chemical warfare service of the United States Army using fuel-spewing flamethrowers to melt snow and ice.
Then, of course, there was the legendary Blizzard of ’88. It is probable that no inhabitants of the area that is now New York, going all the way back to the Lenape Indians, ever had so hellacious an experience of winter as the New Yorkers of March 1888 did. It wasn’t so much the 21 inches of snow, a total surpassed not just last February but also on Dec. 26-27, 1947 (26.4 inches). It was more the winds gusting as high as 85 miles an hour and the single-digit temperatures, and of course the fact that the late-19th-century metropolis simply wasn’t sturdy enough to withstand the onslaught, the likes of which it could never have imagined.
Given modern New York’s far stronger infrastructure, mechanized snow removal and infinitely better communications, it is tempting to believe that no weather event could ever replace that one as the worst in New York history. But one effect of global warming, scientists say, may be more volatile weather, with storms that, if not greater in number, are more intense. So it is probably inadvisable to assume that the worst Mother Nature can inflict on New York has already occurred.
WRITTEN accounts of the Blizzard of ’88, which killed about 100 people in New York and 300 elsewhere, reveal a basic way in which people were different then. When New Yorkers woke up on the morning of Monday, March 12, and beheld what was clearly an awful and even dangerous day to go out — snow rapidly accumulating in big drifts, winds gusting at gale force, temperature in the low 20s and dropping — most of them seem not to have given much thought to staying home.
They did not have radios, of course, and could not really have known how much worse things were going to get. Beyond that, though, job protection and workers’ benefits were essentially unheard of. People were afraid, and rightly so, that if they didn’t show up for work, they would lose not just a day’s pay but their livelihood.
By that afternoon, New York had become virtually cut off from the rest of the world. The telephone, telegraph, electrical and fire alarm wires strung so precariously above the streets tumbled down. Service on the four elevated train lines was all but knocked out, stranding thousands.
Horse-drawn streetcars ground to a halt in the snow and were abandoned, a blessing to the homeless and the lost who took refuge in them. Horses got stuck in the massive drifts and froze to death, only their heads visible above the drifts. Large numbers of sparrows froze to death, too, their lifeless bodies dropping to the street or floating through the air on the wind.
Pedestrians became disoriented and fatigued in the blinding snow. The wind was unbelievable, the streets littered with people’s hats and headwear.
James Algeo, who lived on East 84th Street near the East River, wrote years later about how he and two companions got caught by a gust of wind as they crossed the intersection of Dey Street and Broadway. “I went sailing up Broadway and landed against the newsstand at Knox Hat Store,” he recalled. “One of my companions landed in the Western Union Building, the other went up Park Row and landed at the old World Building.”
New York’s streets at the time were notoriously filthy, and the faces of many pedestrians were left blotched and scratched not just by the searing, horizontally blowing snow, itself like tiny particles of glass raked against the skin, but also by the grit and trash that had lain on the streets and was wedged between the cobblestones.
Frostbite was a major problem. Police officers kept an eye on pedestrians’ ears, and if they saw a pair that looked too white, they took the person aside and rubbed the suspect ears with snow, in the mistaken belief that such an action would prevent frostbite.
Another old wives’ tale of the time was that alcohol was a good way to fortify oneself against the extreme cold. The city’s saloons were packed during the Blizzard of ’88, and many a pickled townsman made the mistake of trying to negotiate the perilous streets, only to end up floundering in a snowdrift. Not all were lucky enough to be pulled out while they were alive.
Clinton Irving Jones, the almost forgotten photographer of the New York ice storm of 1909, was a native of Tompkins County, far upstate, and it is not known if he was living in the city during the Blizzard of ’88. But his photos of Prospect Park suggest that as devastating as the storm was, he would have liked to be around for it.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Link to Article Source
Long-Ago Snow
By MITCH KELLER
ON Monday, Jan. 18, 1909, New Yorkers woke to a city transformed. A weekend storm of snow and sleet had left everything — the biggest trees and the smallest bushes, the trolley wires and street lamps — coated and gleaming with ice, as if made of glass. It was, wrote a reporter for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “as if the fairy queen of childhood days had waved her magic wand and transported us to the kingdom of ice and snow.”
“In Prospect Park,” the reporter continued, “the scenes witnessed were beyond description. Nothing like it has been seen for years, and thousands of persons walked through a perfect garden of wonder.”
We have a good idea what Prospect Park looked like that day because one of the thousands of Brooklynites who went there was a serious amateur photographer named Clinton Irving Jones. Using a 4-by-5 view camera, Mr. Jones took carefully composed photos of the scenes before him. They captured the ice sparkling on the trees like tiny holiday lights, the weaker trees bending under the burden of the ice on their branches, the tracks of the people who went to see it all.
In these photographs, which are on display at the Underbridge Pictures gallery in Dumbo through Jan. 28, Mr. Jones recorded the friendlier aspect of a winter storm, its visual beauty in a pastoral place. But his photos did not, of course, reflect the larger reality of that storm.
With the exception of the rare power blackout, nothing disrupts life in New York like a winter storm. This was especially true a century ago, long before conveniences like the Weather Channel and 24/7 takeout, and devices like computers and cellphones that make instant communication possible.
In those years, even a relatively modest storm like the one that transformed Prospect Park into the proverbial wonderland — several inches of snow and sleet, a little rain mixed in, followed by an ice-up — might play havoc with the lives of New Yorkers. When a warm home depended not on the turn of a thermostat dial but on the availability of coal at the grocer’s, and when milk was delivered each morning door to door, the inability of horse-drawn delivery vehicles to move about could mean days of hardship. Nor did it take much bad weather to disable the overhead wires that provided telephone and trolley service, or to seriously complicate the efforts of horse-drawn fire and rescue vehicles to reach people in need.
DURING the storm in January 1909, for instance, beyond the peaceful confines of Prospect Park, ice-laden trolley wires collapsed in many parts of the city, badly interfering with streetcar traffic and clogging up the streets. Horse-drawn trucks kept getting stuck, further hindering the streetcars, because the horses couldn’t advance in the ice and snow; at the Williamsburg Bridge, The Eagle reported, “The horses attached to a truck fell down and the cars were blocked from 7:35 to 7:55.”
In Long Island City, Queens, telephone wires collapsed onto trolley lines, causing “a big electrical display” and a traffic jam. In Manhattan, ice on the third rail was believed to have caused a short circuit that set fire to a car on the Sixth Avenue el. Back in Brooklyn, according to The Eagle, the weather “put almost the entire fire alarm system in the borough out of commission and created grave danger.”
Emanuel Brutto, a 30-year-old ship’s cook from Barbados, was found frozen to death beneath a tarpaulin in a truck on South Street. The New York Times reported that a barge captain had died of “apoplexy” during the storm, a condition caused, his crew said, by “anxiety for the safety of the barge.”
Then, as now, New York had a conspicuous population of homeless people, many hundreds of whom turned to the Department of Public Charities for shelter that weekend. “Practically all the men and women who applied for shelter were poorly clad, some miserably,” The Eagle said, “and many of them were suffering with frostbitten feet and hands.”
All things considered, New York’s winters are far from arduous, but the city has been struck by plenty of big storms over the years, many of them notable for one reason or another. The storm of last Feb. 11-12 brought the biggest official snowfall in the city’s history, 26.9 inches. The storm of Feb. 9-10, 1969, almost cost Mayor John Lindsay the next election because of his failure to clear the streets of Queens.
After the Blizzard of ’61, Mayor Robert Wagner banned cars in New York for almost a week, sealing off the city with police checkpoints. During the Depression, storms like the Blizzard of ’35 meant government-sponsored snow-removal jobs for thousands of unemployed men. The cleanup of the Blizzard of 1920 included the bizarre sight of soldiers from the chemical warfare service of the United States Army using fuel-spewing flamethrowers to melt snow and ice.
Then, of course, there was the legendary Blizzard of ’88. It is probable that no inhabitants of the area that is now New York, going all the way back to the Lenape Indians, ever had so hellacious an experience of winter as the New Yorkers of March 1888 did. It wasn’t so much the 21 inches of snow, a total surpassed not just last February but also on Dec. 26-27, 1947 (26.4 inches). It was more the winds gusting as high as 85 miles an hour and the single-digit temperatures, and of course the fact that the late-19th-century metropolis simply wasn’t sturdy enough to withstand the onslaught, the likes of which it could never have imagined.
Given modern New York’s far stronger infrastructure, mechanized snow removal and infinitely better communications, it is tempting to believe that no weather event could ever replace that one as the worst in New York history. But one effect of global warming, scientists say, may be more volatile weather, with storms that, if not greater in number, are more intense. So it is probably inadvisable to assume that the worst Mother Nature can inflict on New York has already occurred.
WRITTEN accounts of the Blizzard of ’88, which killed about 100 people in New York and 300 elsewhere, reveal a basic way in which people were different then. When New Yorkers woke up on the morning of Monday, March 12, and beheld what was clearly an awful and even dangerous day to go out — snow rapidly accumulating in big drifts, winds gusting at gale force, temperature in the low 20s and dropping — most of them seem not to have given much thought to staying home.
They did not have radios, of course, and could not really have known how much worse things were going to get. Beyond that, though, job protection and workers’ benefits were essentially unheard of. People were afraid, and rightly so, that if they didn’t show up for work, they would lose not just a day’s pay but their livelihood.
By that afternoon, New York had become virtually cut off from the rest of the world. The telephone, telegraph, electrical and fire alarm wires strung so precariously above the streets tumbled down. Service on the four elevated train lines was all but knocked out, stranding thousands.
Horse-drawn streetcars ground to a halt in the snow and were abandoned, a blessing to the homeless and the lost who took refuge in them. Horses got stuck in the massive drifts and froze to death, only their heads visible above the drifts. Large numbers of sparrows froze to death, too, their lifeless bodies dropping to the street or floating through the air on the wind.
Pedestrians became disoriented and fatigued in the blinding snow. The wind was unbelievable, the streets littered with people’s hats and headwear.
James Algeo, who lived on East 84th Street near the East River, wrote years later about how he and two companions got caught by a gust of wind as they crossed the intersection of Dey Street and Broadway. “I went sailing up Broadway and landed against the newsstand at Knox Hat Store,” he recalled. “One of my companions landed in the Western Union Building, the other went up Park Row and landed at the old World Building.”
New York’s streets at the time were notoriously filthy, and the faces of many pedestrians were left blotched and scratched not just by the searing, horizontally blowing snow, itself like tiny particles of glass raked against the skin, but also by the grit and trash that had lain on the streets and was wedged between the cobblestones.
Frostbite was a major problem. Police officers kept an eye on pedestrians’ ears, and if they saw a pair that looked too white, they took the person aside and rubbed the suspect ears with snow, in the mistaken belief that such an action would prevent frostbite.
Another old wives’ tale of the time was that alcohol was a good way to fortify oneself against the extreme cold. The city’s saloons were packed during the Blizzard of ’88, and many a pickled townsman made the mistake of trying to negotiate the perilous streets, only to end up floundering in a snowdrift. Not all were lucky enough to be pulled out while they were alive.
Clinton Irving Jones, the almost forgotten photographer of the New York ice storm of 1909, was a native of Tompkins County, far upstate, and it is not known if he was living in the city during the Blizzard of ’88. But his photos of Prospect Park suggest that as devastating as the storm was, he would have liked to be around for it.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Link to Article Source
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