As blizzards hit NYC, forget the doom – try snowscrolling

Never mind doomscrolling: try snowscrolling instead. With only a hint of obsession I find myself refreshing PlowNYC, the website which shows in granular detail how recently the streets of New York have felt the ministrations of one of the city’s 2,300 snowplows, deployed in constant rotation as at least 15 inches of the white stuff has blanketed the city.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani – who has faced criticism for his handling of the city’s January blast of freezing weather, in which 19 people died – pulled out all the stops, closing streets, highways and bridges from Sunday night until noon on until noon Monday, and offering 30 bucks an hour to volunteer snow shovellers.

Henry Perahia is retired from the city these days: he’s reached what he calls the “KMA” stage of his career. (Hint: the first word is “kiss”, you work out the rest.) When he and I first met he was Chief Bridge Officer for the City of New York, responsible for the planning and administration of all aspects of design, construction and maintenance of approximately 850 City-owned bridges, tunnels, and culverts. (Never, ever forget the culverts.) He has nothing but admiration for the men and women who keep a city moving in a storm. “It snows, you get that plow out, you get the people out of bed, and you do what you got to do,” he says, pointing out that as far as the East River Bridges are concerned – Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg – a certain skill with a snowplow is required. “The bridges have finger joints” – which allow for expansion and contraction of the roadway – “and they’re a little bit raised up. So you have to know about that.”

I check out the Brooklyn Bridge on PlowNYC; the approaches at least have been cleared in the last three hours. West End Avenue, near my childhood home, has been plowed within the last hour. Joshua Goodman, Deputy Commissioner for the New York City Department of Sanitation (“New York’s Strongest”) called the deployment “full-force activation”: in addition to the plows, 700 salt spreaders were doing their things, along with 2,600 sanitation workers on rolling 12-hour shifts.

Friends back home send me pictures of brownstone stoops, of cars buried to invisibility, of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge swirled with blizzarding drifts. The Mayor made a personal call to Victoria, one of New York’s nearly one million kids in the public school system, to announce a “classic snow day” on Monday: no online school, no remote learning, just sleds and snowballs and snowmen. Snowpeople.

The bliss of a snow day. My blizzard was the Blizzard of ’78: I don’t recall a phone call from Mayor Ed Koch (““How’m I doin’?”) but I do recall the hushed and blanketed silence of the streets and avenues, dragging my bright red plastic sled to Central Park, the drifts high enough to creep over the tops of my beloved 1970s moon boots.

Nostalgia is not just a sentimental longing for the past, it is also a longing for who you once were. I flew back to New York just after the first big chill and found myself feeling pretty grumpy about the “sneckdowns” – as the greying, increasingly dog-shit covered, icy buildups blocking crosswalks have been dubbed – that you had to clamber over every time you wanted to go east to west or north to south, I didn’t want to wear snowboots, I wanted to wear my good shoes and not fear falling and breaking my hip.

And this new breed of snowstorm, intense, relentless, brings something other than a sense of relief from the daily grind, whether that’s work or school. Yes, the President of the United States asked facetiously “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???” when the January storm struck the East Coast; but what we are seeing now is a product of the climate crisis as a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture.

What will this mean for the city workers of the future, I ask Perahia. “Well, the climate is changing, and there’s science to back that up,” he says. “But in government, it has to be said, you’re reactive, not proactive. You don't change the weather, you deal with the weather. Think of all the overtime,” he says wryly. Strap on your moonboots: there’s heavy weather ahead.

Photograph by Ryan Murphy / Getty Images