"How the Tempest Howled": New York's Terrifying Blizzard of 1888
The blizzard set to hit New York City this week may be the worst on record yet, but there will never be storm reporting as dramatic and spectacular as that which followed the Blizzard of 1888.
New York City history site My Inwood reproduced the New York Herald's cover of the March storm, which shut down the city for days with two feet of snow and 85-mph winds.
When public transportation shut down, hundreds of people escaped from Brooklyn by crossing the East River on an ice floe. Dock owners began charging people to use the ladders, where the Herald reported, "This fee was insisted upon even when some of the victims were in danger of drowning."
Trains full of people were trapped without food, or, it seems, manners: when the railroad company sent the trapped passengers a meal, "It was greedily taken by the men, who acted in the most selfish manner."
Around 200 people died, many of them frozen, and hospitals were deluged with "a ghastly procession of wounded men and women."
Even worse, "gorgeously attired young men of fashion" were forced to take shelter on the Bowery alongside actual tramps.
All night the lodging house dormitories were crowded with snow bound dandies who scratched and grumbled and tossed about on the hard pallets in the ill smelling cubbyholes. And wonderfully comical scenes took place at the breakfast tables, where waiters were paralyzed with astonishment at demands for napkins and finger bowls. Many of the ten-cent lodging houses raised their price for a cot to fifty.
