Snow and the City

New York Today: Live Snowstorm Updates - NYTimes.com

Good morning on this frigid, snowy Friday. New York City public schools are closed.

The first winter I spent in New York City there was a snow like this. It happened on a Friday and all the businesses (those, at least, whose people needed to commute to get home) closed early; where I worked, we got off at noon. I lived on the upper East Side so all I needed to get home was the Lexington Avenue Line. By mid-afternoon, driving was banned in Manhattan. In the the phone booth at the corner bar some guy was screaming at City Hall; he'd just spent an hour shoveling his car out of a parking space and then been told by a cop he couldn't drive it. That evening another guy made news by picking up Tammy Grimes in a sleigh and driving her to her theater on Broadway; she was starring in "The Unsinkable Molly Brown."

Clearing snow from Manhattan is a slow (and expensive) proposition. There is no place to put the stuff; everything is either street or sidewalk (with the exception of Central Park, of course, and a few other small patches) so all the snow has to be hauled away in trucks and dumped into one of the rivers, the Hudson or the East (although the East River is not really a river at all, but that's another story). It was Monday before people were allowed to drive again.

That weekend was the quietest—and best smelling—two days in the five years I lived there. Snow in the city's a mess, but it's a treat.

(Snow here too, maybe four inches, not as bad as predicted, and also very cold. It's supposed to warm up on Sunday just long enough to rain for a while and then get cold again. Winter has arrived.)