New York City this weekend is bracing for what could be the first meaningful hit of snow we’ve seen here in 600-something days.
Some folks are really looking forward to it. They miss the snow.
Me? I wouldn’t care if I never saw another flake of snow again.
Sure, snow is fun if you’re a kid. You go sleigh-riding, build snow forts and have snowball fights (even if you don’t get the day off from school anymore thanks to remote learning).
But I quickly tired of the white stuff as an adult.
Take the Blizzard of 1996.
I had been at the Advance for about a year and was heading in to work my 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift at the paper. Only I couldn’t get my car out because the snow had been falling for hours already.
I phoned my night city editor, Leslie Palma-Simoncek, and told her I couldn’t make it in.
“Oh, they don’t like to hear that,” I was told.
In other words, get your butt in here.
So I went back out and was lucky enough to find a neighbor who had their snowblower going. That got my car out of its spot.
Then it was a 45-minute crawl through the tempest to the paper, a trip that would ordinarily take less than half that time.
Coming home the next morning, my car got stuck on the Staten Island Expressway service road. I had to abandon it there, hoof it home up Grymes Hill and pick up my car after the roads had been cleared.
So, yeah, enough of snow.
Check out these photos of Staten Island encased in ice during coldest Christmas ever in 1983
Forty years ago, one Arctic blast after another put country in historic deep freeze for days.
I live in a hilly part of the North Shore. When I bought the house, I didn’t take into account how I would get in and out of the neighborhood in the snow. One treacherous, white-knuckle slide down hilly Fiedler Avenue to Victory Boulevard after a fairly mild snowstorm forever put the fear of God into me on that account.
In fact, there’s no good way off my block no matter how big or small the snowstorm. It’s going to be a slippery, heart-stopping ride up or down a hill no matter how you go.
Back when we still used oil to heat the house, we were waiting for an oil delivery when a big snowstorm hit the city. The oil truck couldn’t make it up the hill. The oil tank ran dry, my furnace crapped out and we had no heat for a night.
My wife and I and our three little kids slept in the same bedroom, with a space heater going, that night. Luckily the temperature was in the low 40s and our dependable Rucci Oil folks were able to make it to the house the next day, restart our furnace and fill our oil tank.
It’s things like that that make you feel like Father of the Year. Thank you, snow.
Never mind all the worry about big snowstorms that fell tree branches and knock down power lines. Or having to shovel your sidewalk again and again in the midst of a big storm. Or the inane milk-bread-and-eggs runs on supermarkets whenever any amount of snow is predicated. The waiting for the Sanitation Department to plow your block.
And this being Staten Island, big snowstorms mean having to dig our cars out. And that means having to defend that means using traffic cones or garbage cans to guard that parking spot you just created. Force by Mother Nature to become one of those people. And navigating snow-narrowed roads in the face of knuckleheaded fellow motorists.
Snow fills Oswego Street in Sunnyside following Blizzard of 1996. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance
So I’m in no hurry to see any amount of snow. You want snow all the time? Move upstate. You’ll get plenty.
You miss having snow in NYC? I don’t (opinion)
5
0
06.01.2024
New York City this weekend is bracing for what could be the first meaningful hit of snow we’ve seen here in 600-something days.
Some folks are really looking forward to it. They miss the snow.
Me? I wouldn’t care if I never saw another flake of snow again.
Sure, snow is fun if you’re a kid. You go sleigh-riding, build snow forts and have snowball fights (even if you don’t get the day off from school anymore thanks to remote learning).
But I quickly tired of the white stuff as an adult.
Take the Blizzard of 1996.
I had been at the Advance for about a year and was heading in to work my 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift at the paper. Only I couldn’t get my car out because the snow had been falling for hours already.
I phoned my night city editor, Leslie Palma-Simoncek, and told her I couldn’t make it in.
“Oh, they don’t like to hear that,” I was told.
In other words, get........
© The Staten Island Advance
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
