Monday, February 8, 2021 – Unprepared for a monster snowstorm…NYC in the 1880’s

By admin

281st Edition

Monday,

February 8, 2021

An unidentified Brooklyn street in March 1888. Photo by Breading G. Way via Brooklyn Museum

Snow? You missed the Big One

The storm, from my windows at least, was disappointing. Not two feet of snow, no sprawling drifts.

But the real big one, the snowstorm that did the most damage and had the greatest impact on our City was in 1888. So return with me to the thrilling days of yesteryear, to March 11, 1888.

This is what the New York Herald had to say, a few days later when the City began to move again:

With men and women dying in her ghostly streets, New York saw day breaking through the wild clouds yesterday morning. Nature had overwhelmed the metropolis, and citizens were found dead in the mighty snowdrifts. White, frozen hands sticking up out of the billowed and furrowed wastes testified to the unspeakable power that had desolated the city.

Had Jules Verne written such a story a week ago New Yorkers would have laughed and pronounced it a clever but impossible romance.

Yet here was the stupendous reality. Within forty-eight hours the city was converted into an Arctic wilderness, cut off from all railway and telegraph communication. The white hurricane had strewn her busiest and gayest thoroughfares with wreck and ruin. Courts of justice were closed and the vast machinery of commerce was paralyzed. Groans of mutilated humanity filled the air. (Oh, to have been a journalist then!)

Yes, March. The temperature had hit a warmish 50 degrees on March 10. And this wasn’t the most snow. Storms in 1947, 2006 and 2016 laid down more. But March 1888 was one of the worst blizzards in American history, killing more than 400 people in the Northeast (where 25% of Americans lived) and dumping as much as 55 inches of snow in some areas – the greatest snowfall since the formation of the United States.

On March 11, Arctic air from Canada collided with Gulf air from the south and temperatures plunged. Rain turned to snow and winds reached hurricane-strength levels – the 1888 storm became known as “The Great White Hurricane”. By midnight, gusts were recorded at 85 miles per hour in New York City. Along with heavy snow, there was a complete whiteout in the city when the residents awoke the next morning, and the storm worsened that night and into the 12th. Simply walking the streets was perilous.

A researcher who dug through newspaper files in 1988 found many stories about 1888:

“I saw a man for one and a half hours trying to cross 96^th Street. We watched him start, get quarter way across, and then be flung back against the building on the comer. The last time he tried it, he was caught up in a whirl of snow and disappeared from our view. The next morning seven horses, policemen, and his brother charged the drift, and his body was kicked out of the drift.”

Although “only” 21 inches of snow fell, the City ground to a near halt in the face of massive drifts rising up to 30 feet and powerful winds. Thousands of people were stranded on elevated trains; in many areas, enterprising people with ladders offered to rescue the passengers for a small fee. Telegraph lines, water mains and gas lines were all above ground and froze and were inaccessible to repair crews. Wall Street was forced to close for three straight days. New Yorkers camped out in hotel lobbies waiting for the worst of the blizzard to pass. Mark Twain was in New York, stranded at his hotel for several days and P.T. Barnum entertained some of the stranded at Madison Square Garden.

The New York Times, March 13, 1888, reported:

Before the day had well advanced, every horse-car and elevated railroad train in the city had stopped running; the streets were almost impassable to men or horses by reason of the huge masses of drifting snow; the electric wires – telegraph and telephone — connecting spots in the city or opening communication with places outside were nearly all broken; hardly a train was out from the city or came into it during the entire day; the mails were stopped, and every variety of business dependent on motion or locomotion was stopped.

In New York City, damage done by the storm was estimated at $20 million (by comparison, this was close to 10% of the U.S. Federal Government’s entire expenditures in 1888), and, it is said, 200 New Yorkers died because of the storm.

The 1888 storm had a lasting impact on the City. Like most American cities that had entered the era of electric illumination and the telephone in the late 19th century, vast forests of poles carrying a helter-skelter network of wires lined and crisscrossed New York streets. Unsightly and dangerous: Wires snapped, spraying sparks and occasionally injuring (or killing) an unlucky passerby.

The wires belonged to Western Union Telegraph Co., Gold and Stock Ticker Co., and the United States, Metropolitan, Brush and East River electric lighting companies, as well as those of burglar alarm companies and the police and fire departments. They were draped from poles that ranged from 55 to 150 feet tall, with dozens of cross arms. Adding to this confusion, each company erected its own poles.

The city had passed a law in 1884 ordering the various utility companies to place their wires below the ground, which they simply ignored, saying the costs were too high.

After the storm, The New York Tribune printed an editorial reminding New Yorkers that not only had a law had been passed to bury the wires, but that the companies, which owned them, had more than enough money to make it happen. The New York Times chimed in: “If the telegraph wires had been placed underground as contemplated by the law, they would have been made to serve a specially important duty at a time when they were most sorely needed.”

In the fall of 1887, Mayor Abram Hewitt had tried without success to get a proposal through the state legislature to put wires underground. Then, in January 1889, a new City administration under Mayor Hugh Grant coupled with two very public deaths from the downed wires finally resulted in an end to the injunctions for the companies that owned the wires. Within the next few years, all of the poles and wires were dismantled and the wires were buried underground where they would be more secure. This ensured that neither wind nor snow would cut off electricity to New York City again. “When we fix a time, we mean it,” said Grant. “When the time is ended, the poles will come down.” When financier Jay Gould, who owned Western Union, contended in court that the city’s action was “unconstitutional,” the court supported the city.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen Blank
RIHS

EDITORIAL

To this day, just ride over the R.I. Bridge into a neighborhood of overhead wires and a hodge-podge of phone, cable, electric lines jerry rigged on poles.  Some also hold sneakers and abandoned grocery bags.
These unsightly masses of  dangerous lines are there for all to see and for the squirrel Olympians and for the critters to feast on!

FROM A READER
Thanks for great history of knitting in WW I and II.  I remember some classmates in first and second grade knitting during recess for brothers and family members. Jay Jacobson

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Arc de Triomphe, Paris
Where the American Soldiers dreamed of marching by at the end of the Great War.
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Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
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