The night before the monster blizzard strikes Manhattan, my mother-in-law texts from upstate New York. “A foot of snow?” she writes. “Be sure to pick up milk and necessities … no storm here, but we’ve already had over 100 inches.”
The supermarket nearest us, usually empty at 10pm, is packed with people. There is not much bread — and yes, they have no bananas.
Nothing happens until noon the next day: small flakes get in our eyes and melt on the pavement as I walk our youngest child and his friend to a café that has a huge stock of board games. We play one in which you must build a civilisation in a land called Catan. The rules are complicated and the two seven-year-olds eventually dispense with them entirely. “Let’s just all take some more lumber and iron ore,” they say every so often.
Walking home at about five with my son and the emperor of Catan, a fine white film is forming on the pavement. Three hours later, as I’m reading the seven-year-old a story about a city under assault by a dragon, our phones buzz with an emergency alert from Zohran Mamdani. “How did the mayor get into your phone?” he asks.
The truth is, New York mayors have to throw their weight around when it snows. Bill de Blasio took things a little far in 2015 when he forecast a blizzard “the likes of which we have never seen before”, ahead of six inches of snow. Arriving at his press briefing the next morning, de Blasio acknowledged that he might have overdone it by reading out The Onion’s parody of his blizzard warning, advising New Yorkers to “make peace with whatever higher power they call God”, for “the furious hoarfrost bearing down upon us knows neither mercy nor reason, and all within the five boroughs will perish, cowering in their brittle dwellings”.
Blizzard hits the Lower East Side in New York on Monday
RYAN MURPHY/GETTY IMAGES
Mamdani, leader of our new socialist paradise, appears in a custom-embroidered Carhart jacket that receives an admiring write-up in GQ. His phone warning is as loud as a President Trump post, speckled with capitals: “a State of Emergency for New York City; a TRAVEL BAN is in effect BEGINNING AT 9PM,” it screams. Non-essential vehicles must stay off the roads until noon on Monday.
Eric Adams, the former mayor, also issues a warning on X: “Stock up. Charge up. And plan to Netflix and chill for a few days.” Ew! people say. Does he know what the phrase means? Oh wait, he does. “More snow means more future New Yorkers,” he says.
The Naked Cowboy performing in Times Square
TIMOTHY A.CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Just after 9pm, I take myself out for a jog. I have to go back to get a ski mask. The snow is almost horizontal, coating the north-facing sides of the old Victorian street lamps that light the path around Central Park. You can no longer see midtown. The snow is bright underfoot and lines the branches of trees like cherry blossom.
Monday
Will Pavia
JULIAN WALTER FOR THE TIMES
It is really chucking it down the next morning. My wife clears a path to the basement laundry room; 45 minutes later, it is gone. It is a “snow day” for the children: a proper one as in days of yore, no school, no remote learning. Mine build a fortress stocked with snowballs in the garden at the back of our building. The walls of their stronghold are about two feet high, but they have built it in the lowest corner of the garden and it’s quite easy to hit them from the terrace, where the tables and chairs are caked with great wadges of snow. It is heavy, wet snow, great for throwing.
By the time we get to Central Park, at about 2.30pm, the blizzard has stopped and giant snowmen are rising on the lawns. One is just a colossal head, six-feet high, like an Olmec statue.
JULIAN WALTER FOR THE TIMES
My middle son has brought his skis and I build him a jump at the bottom of a sledding hill. As soon as you start doing something like this, other children assume that you are available to work on their projects. “Can you build me a snowman?” says a little girl.
JULIAN WALTER FOR THE TIMES
I’m busy at the moment, I say. Try that guy over there.
“Can you build us a wall?” asks one of a battalion of eight-year-olds who are snowball fighting three eleven-year-olds from a rival school. The fight escalates into hand-to-hand combat, a pile of them wrestling on the ground until someone’s mother breaks them up and it occurs to me that I am just standing there watching.
The journey home is long and arduous. The seven-year-old keeps disappearing to roll in drifts and to bang his knee while attempting a swan dive on Park Avenue. A young family are just ahead of us, the mum steering a push chair, her husband with a shovel, cutting paths for her through the snowbanks.
Tuesday
The next day is gorgeous: bright sunshine, the city capped in nearly 20 inches of snow. The parked cars look as if they are wearing white Russian hats.
“How was it for you, the break, the blizzard?” says a mother at the school gates.
“We survived,” says her friend, either about the snow or the extended period at home with her children. “We survived.”