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Ready for round #2 ?
Dave knows how to make a free link; you and Bill could learn. I can see the subject though, and have been noticing. It was really bad back in the 70's before the pooper-scooper law, which has been pretty successful but dog owners seem to think they get free snow days.
As far as the storm goes, at least it's starting later this time around, so I think I'll be able to get a restaurant meal in, although I am prepared with a bottle and half a steak from last night just in case. Same strategy paid off a month ago which was also on a Sunday. There may be more snow this time but it doesn't look like the extended sub-zero temps so we should get rid of it faster.
The sidewalks of the east village and lower east side were covered with dog shit well into the 90's but I did notice people cleaning up more often by the turn of the century. I once witnessed a woman in a summer dress and sandals step in a very loose pile. She was extremely upset but didn't realize that it had flown all the way up her leg, far above the knee. I wasn't sure whether to tell her or not, fearing that it would just add to her embarrassment. I decided to let it go, that she and her girlfriend had no choice but to return to where ever they came from, hopefully an apartment nearby, and would figure it out sooner rather than later. Now, in my wiser years, I would tell her.
most of my free links were supplied by someone else but i did use the archive link (long may it wave) to read this.
there is a chrome extension so you just have to click on it and input the blocked page url.
nice to see they are cancelling school tomorrow. none of this remote learning. i wonder how much was from the outcry to let kids have a little joy or it just was too much of a logistical hassle?
looking good out there. almost wish i had some boots.
tribeca reports a mere two inches as the thousands upon thousands of decommissioned drones they purchased from israel and ukraine has successfully blown the majority of the snow out towards staten island. no word yet from the mayor of staten island if they have plans to retaliate or if in their words they will maintain "fuggetaboutit."
only question remaining, is it time to defrost "the deer" in the freezer in the basement?
crunchy peanut butter supplies are reaching critical levels as moral reserves reach their lowest depths of the crisis. im sorry, im being told that i misread the prompter. its actually morel levels. in related news, the entire kitchen staff of le bernardin was "rescued" by ICE from an ill-fated foraging expedition in central park. 14 protestors died from exposure while waiting in line outside of a pop up bagels.
just got a hand delivered cease and desist order along with my labneh and shish tawouk from a lebanese restaurant. it says "keep jim louis' name out of your dirty jew mouth but enjoy this housemade baklava as a gift to our newest customer and thank you for your patronage!
wow, dont know how to feel about this. the baklava was kind of stale.
rude.
seeing 19.5 inches in washington heights. 26 in quogue. shirley just said fuck it last night. we are done measuring. was a downed power line the cause? who can say?
remsenburg-speonk???? nosing ahead with 27.5 with north patchogue a scant .3 inches behind. shirley airport reports making snow angels in 26 inches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remsenburg-Speonk,_New_York
Lucy reported 16" at Sarah Lawrence this morning
18 inches so far and still coming down. Don't think I'll get in much walking today, but may try a little if it ever stops. Tried to upload a photo but I just get an internal server error.
Topography of the urban snowscape. Sneckdown anyone?
Sorry, didn't realize; a lot of the articles are free.
This past week in New York City, fifteen inches of snow fell and more than twenty-two hundred snowplows pushed it away. Twelve thousand miles of sidewalk were shovelled. Two hundred and nine million pounds of salt were spread, and, after it got really bad, two hundred thousand gallons of calcium chloride, a chemical ice melt, were deployed. Sometimes the work you do leaves its mark; sometimes it doesn’t. With snow, the evidence has a tendency to melt. But, this year, as the temperature refused to rise above freezing, what remained hardened into ice, and settled. In the streets, these conditions have brought attention to something called a sneckdown. “Sneckdown” is a portmanteau of “snow” and “neckdown,” a term for a part of the sidewalk, also known as a curb extension, that juts into the street, to protect pedestrians. The sneckdown is the snow that builds up on parts of the street that cars don’t use, acting as a natural curb extension. At intersections, it can be found mostly on corners, as the city pushes it one way and property owners push it the other. The sneckdown is also what people awkwardly have to step through as a result. Recently, I have encountered sneckdowns while going to work, going to the gym, popping to the store, hurrying for the bus, and on the way to a hard-to-get dinner reservation that a friend made, perhaps unwisely, weeks before the snowstorm. Almost any New Yorker who has to cross the street has become familiar with the sneckdown, often at a level just between the sock and the waterproof shoe. I saw my first sneckdown of the year on a corner of Gates Avenue, in Clinton Hill, a few yards from my apartment. The snow had stopped falling, and a plow had come through. My neighbors had shovelled their stoops. But there remained a solid mound of ice, curving out across the road, like a bumper on one side of a pool table. I walked out and tried to avoid becoming a billiard ball. Sneckdowns are something of a gray area, as they live partly on the sidewalk and partly on the street. They are where the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the state meet. It gets slippery. To some urbanists, a sneckdown offers a vision of a better world. The term was popularized by Clarence Eckerson, Jr., a documentarian who started filming sneckdowns in the early twenty-tens, for the pro-transit website Streetsblog. “It’s the space that is revealed that we could take back for other things,” Eckerson told me recently. Sneckdowns slow cars as they turn, and make pedestrians more visible. Ahead of the storm, Streetsblog called on readers to send photos of sneckdowns to the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to show him where the city could make more room for pedestrians. This past Tuesday, Eckerson ran around City Hall and his home, in Jackson Heights, hunting for the best sneckdowns, for a new video. He had a full shoulder-replacement surgery scheduled for the next day. That morning, he shot some pickups; an anesthesiologist fitted him with a mask a few hours later. “I’m very dedicated,” he told me over Zoom, his arm in a padded black sling. Out on the street, he’d seen a huge eighteen-wheeler truck, hauling Goya beans, bend around a sneckdown in Jackson Heights—and nail the turn with five or six feet of snow to spare. “You could take back some of it at the very least,” he said The other day, at the intersection of 174th Street and Broadway, in Washington Heights, I met Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Sanitation, to watch the destruction of a few sneckdowns. It was the sixth day in a row below freezing, and Goodman wore a green D.S.N.Y. jacket, a gray beanie, and duck boots. Together, we watched a skid steer, a maneuverable miniature excavator, attack a sneckdown that had built up on a street corner, near a gas station. Conditions were tough. Handheld tools sometimes broke. “These are one of the only things that can break an ice boulder,” Goodman told me. Not every pile of ice is a sneckdown. There is a complex taxonomy. (It helps to know your enemy.) Sanitation workers call sneckdowns corner caps. The narrow path through a sneckdown that lets people cross the street is known as a “curb cut.” A blocked-off bus stop is not a sneckdown. “I’ve seen people post their own photos and I’ll be, like, ‘Well that’s not a sneckdown,’ ” Eckerson told me. One helpful heuristic: if you can see tire tracks, it’s not a sneckdown—the cars have been using it. Whether the furrow of snow in a lane of parked cars is a sneckdown depends on your philosophical opinion of what the street is for. Most of the time, when people complain about lingering, no-man’s-land snow, they are complaining about something called the curbline. This is the snow that piles up between the cleared path of the sidewalk and the street, often against parked cars, maybe crowned with trash. Property owners don’t have to clear more than a four-foot-wide path, enough for a stroller or a wheelchair; the city doesn’t have to, either. Goodman told me it’s simple: if snow is on the street, it’s the city’s responsibility. If it’s on the sidewalk, it’s the property owner’s. But there are complications; the snow around a parked car is the responsibility of the driver—even though it’s on the street. If a bus stop is sheltered, the Department of Transportation is on the hook. A regular bus stop is the responsibility of the property owner whose place abuts the stop, but the city must insure that the bus can pull up to the curb. Previous mayors, Goodman told me, thought it was fine as long as the bus door could open. This year, Mamdani insisted to Sanitation that there be pedestrian access at every stop. On Broadway, a crew of emergency shovellers, whom the city pays a starting rate of $19.14 an hour, were deployed to another corner, outside a radiologist’s office. One shoveller, Anthony Gutierrez, who is normally a truck driver, was hacking away at a sneckdown with an ice scraper. Next to him, Daniel Johannes wore a bright orange vest that said “laborer” and an ushanka hat. “I have shovelling experience—I once excavated a big hole,” he told me. Johannes lives locally and usually works in construction. This was his third twelve-hour shift. “Our neighbors need to pass these streets,” he said, undeterred. Before the recent snowstorm, the city activated PlowNYC, a real-time map showing when every street in the city was last plowed. The computer program that tracks the snowplows is called Blade Runner. When it isn’t snowing, Sanitation uses it to track trash collection. This is because the vast majority of New York City’s snowplows are regular garbage trucks with a plow attached. The snowstorm presented an outlet for Mamdani’s embrace of “sewer socialism,” which focusses on everyday municipal problems. (It could also be a trip wire: the former mayor John Lindsay was pelted for poorly handling a blizzard in the sixties.) During the storm, Mamdani was shovelling out a car trapped near public housing in Bed-Stuy. The Governor, Kathy Hochul, told him to put on a hat. Javier Lojan, the acting commissioner of sanitation, told me that Mamdani was at morning roll call with the workers on the first day of the storm. (He said, of the mayor’s shovelling form, “He’s got to bend his knees a little more, maybe.”) Despite the murkiness of sneckdowns, sanitation workers often end up taking care of them. Back on Broadway, the ice on the corner was, technically, the business’s responsibility. “The fact that it’s on the corner doesn’t change the fact that it’s sidewalk,” Goodman told me. “But we’re doing it—we can’t leave it there.” Arguing about snow in subfreezing temperatures can remind you of the first law of thermodynamics—that snow can’t be created or destroyed. It has to go somewhere. The curbline may be ugly, but it is where property owners are supposed to put the snow—it’s out of the way. The city also doesn’t clear every sneckdown. “Not all sneckdowns are created equal,” Goodman said. “Some of them are not obstructing anything at all. They can just stay there.” Anyway, the sun usually deals with it for us. We’re only vexed by the sneckdowns now because it’s still freezing. “There is a Foucaultian aspect to it,” Goodman told me. “What’s public and what’s private isn’t inherent. It’s socially constructed. It’s shaped by cultural factors and the fact that it is below thirty-two degrees.” One way out could be simply to heat the ice. In New York, the city has snow melters, which are just slightly warm trucks, but are commonly called hot tubs. The melter sits over a sewer line, idling while heating the snow to thirty-eight degrees, barely above freezing, and drips the water directly into a drain. The city is running twelve melters; I visited one in Inwood, by the Harlem River, that handles all the snow in Manhattan above Fifty-ninth Street. When I arrived, the melter was surrounded by a pool of water, a few inches deep, which gently lapped against my shoes. Three twelve-foot-tall orange excavators took bites out of a mound of snow and ferried it to the hot tub. It had been so long since I had seen snow melt that it was almost intoxicating. The trucks hauling the snow frolicked in the water, sending dirty gray ripples toward me. I resisted the urge to run my hand through the slush. Usually, a sneckdown is a fleeting thing. But this year’s never-ending freeze showed that cars could still get around without the extra space. Do we want to live in a world carved out by the sneckdown? “I don’t want the snow there permanently,” Eckerson said. But, he asked, could we imagine the space where the ice sits transforming into concrete and trees, somewhere to rest, or a spot for children to safely cross the street? “You can make them pretty,” he said. “Bushes, trees, seating, if there’s a big enough street.” Earlier, in Washington Heights, I’d asked the shovellers whether they could imagine the sneckdown before them as something else. “I think that New York City is a pedestrian and transit city, so I’m a hundred per cent behind that,” Johannes, the construction worker, said. “But that takes up the space for the cars,” his fellow-shoveller, Gutierrez, said. “The traffic is a nightmare. It’s not good. You don’t get anywhere to park.” Gutierrez continued, “You fix one thing, you mess up the other stuff.” Over the days, I saw my local sneckdown more than I saw my friends and family. I watched it yellow slightly, like the fingers of a smoker. But on Monday I walked to Gates Avenue, and my sneckdown was gone. The curb showed evidence of scraping. I sailed through the intersection. It felt slightly unfair to me that it hadn’t been given an honest chance to melt. But the air was still frigid, and there was plenty of snow to step around. ♦
i wonder how many trees would really transform the city. says they planted 1000000 new ones since 2015 upping the canopy to 22% of the city. another million would be to 30%. still so many areas bereft.
Boots? Totes? Rubbers?
No galoshes for me, but for deep slushy conditions I've used knee-high rubber wellingtons with heavy over the calf socks. After the first storm when it was snowy and frigid I resorted to my insulated waterproof hiking boots which are normally reserved for the field. And after observing their utility in Bucks for years I broke down and got winter Blundstones, insulated and waterproof; been getting a lot of use from those in the cold, though they're short for the deepest drifts and piles. The worst thing is all the salt and chemical melts. The rubber boots can deal with it but leather needs maintenance to keep from getting salt burned and scarred.
i was looking at these yesterday but id probably yet more use out of hiking boots.
https://www.cabelas.com/p/lacrosse-alphaburly-pro-hunting-boots-for-men
these are my deep shit go to. Good mukluk
Welcome to blue stone. I keep two pairs because they take so long to break in. A dress pair and the old beat up comfy ones. But last year I discovered Seavees and got a couple of ankle high pairs.
id check your mapping app, bill.
i always think those slip ons wont fit well without lacing. tell me im wrong!
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Ready for round #2 ?
- steve 2-22-2026 12:38 pm
Dave knows how to make a free link; you and Bill could learn. I can see the subject though, and have been noticing. It was really bad back in the 70's before the pooper-scooper law, which has been pretty successful but dog owners seem to think they get free snow days.
As far as the storm goes, at least it's starting later this time around, so I think I'll be able to get a restaurant meal in, although I am prepared with a bottle and half a steak from last night just in case. Same strategy paid off a month ago which was also on a Sunday. There may be more snow this time but it doesn't look like the extended sub-zero temps so we should get rid of it faster.
- alex 2-22-2026 1:25 pm [add a comment]
The sidewalks of the east village and lower east side were covered with dog shit well into the 90's but I did notice people cleaning up more often by the turn of the century. I once witnessed a woman in a summer dress and sandals step in a very loose pile. She was extremely upset but didn't realize that it had flown all the way up her leg, far above the knee. I wasn't sure whether to tell her or not, fearing that it would just add to her embarrassment. I decided to let it go, that she and her girlfriend had no choice but to return to where ever they came from, hopefully an apartment nearby, and would figure it out sooner rather than later. Now, in my wiser years, I would tell her.
- steve 2-22-2026 1:41 pm [add a comment]
Isn’t that what leaky fire hydrants are for?
- bill 2-22-2026 5:01 pm [add a comment]
most of my free links were supplied by someone else but i did use the archive link (long may it wave) to read this.
there is a chrome extension so you just have to click on it and input the blocked page url.
- dave 2-22-2026 1:57 pm [add a comment]
nice to see they are cancelling school tomorrow. none of this remote learning. i wonder how much was from the outcry to let kids have a little joy or it just was too much of a logistical hassle?
- dave 2-22-2026 3:45 pm [add a comment]
looking good out there. almost wish i had some boots.
- dave 2-22-2026 10:58 pm [add a comment]
7.75” here supposedly
- bill 2-23-2026 6:35 am [add a comment]
looks like over a 12" near me. we go now to alex wilson standing on an ice floe in new york harbor for the latest.
- dave 2-23-2026 7:37 am [add a comment]
i have just been informed that jim louis has been out since 3 am shoveling snow onto his driveway and has cut the power to his property. no word if he did things the old fashioned way by taking an axe to a utility pole or simply flipped off his breakers inside the house.
- dave 2-23-2026 7:54 am [add a comment]
tribeca reports a mere two inches as the thousands upon thousands of decommissioned drones they purchased from israel and ukraine has successfully blown the majority of the snow out towards staten island. no word yet from the mayor of staten island if they have plans to retaliate or if in their words they will maintain "fuggetaboutit."
- dave 2-23-2026 8:01 am [add a comment]
only question remaining, is it time to defrost "the deer" in the freezer in the basement?
- dave 2-23-2026 8:16 am [add a comment]
crunchy peanut butter supplies are reaching critical levels as moral reserves reach their lowest depths of the crisis. im sorry, im being told that i misread the prompter. its actually morel levels. in related news, the entire kitchen staff of le bernardin was "rescued" by ICE from an ill-fated foraging expedition in central park. 14 protestors died from exposure while waiting in line outside of a pop up bagels.
- dave 2-23-2026 8:39 am [add a comment]
just got a hand delivered cease and desist order along with my labneh and shish tawouk from a lebanese restaurant. it says "keep jim louis' name out of your dirty jew mouth but enjoy this housemade baklava as a gift to our newest customer and thank you for your patronage!
wow, dont know how to feel about this. the baklava was kind of stale.
rude.
- dave 2-23-2026 9:02 am [add a comment]
seeing 19.5 inches in washington heights. 26 in quogue. shirley just said fuck it last night. we are done measuring. was a downed power line the cause? who can say?
- dave 2-23-2026 10:03 am [add a comment]
remsenburg-speonk???? nosing ahead with 27.5 with north patchogue a scant .3 inches behind. shirley airport reports making snow angels in 26 inches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remsenburg-Speonk,_New_York
- dave 2-23-2026 11:28 am [add a comment]
Lucy reported 16" at Sarah Lawrence this morning
- steve 2-23-2026 11:57 am [add a comment]
18 inches so far and still coming down. Don't think I'll get in much walking today, but may try a little if it ever stops. Tried to upload a photo but I just get an internal server error.
- alex 2-23-2026 12:23 pm [add a comment]
do you walk most days? do you keep track of distance?
- dave 2-23-2026 12:26 pm [add a comment]
Every day; I've been averaging over 10K steps/day for the last year. That's around 5 miles. Was over 20K on Saturday so I can afford a lost day. Hopefully things will be navigable by tomorrow afternoon.
- alex 2-23-2026 12:32 pm [add a comment]
Topography of the urban snowscape. Sneckdown anyone?
- alex 2-23-2026 4:27 pm [add a comment]
got a free link?
- steve 2-23-2026 4:33 pm [add a comment]
Sorry, didn't realize; a lot of the articles are free.
This past week in New York City, fifteen inches of snow fell and more than twenty-two hundred snowplows pushed it away. Twelve thousand miles of sidewalk were shovelled. Two hundred and nine million pounds of salt were spread, and, after it got really bad, two hundred thousand gallons of calcium chloride, a chemical ice melt, were deployed. Sometimes the work you do leaves its mark; sometimes it doesn’t. With snow, the evidence has a tendency to melt. But, this year, as the temperature refused to rise above freezing, what remained hardened into ice, and settled. In the streets, these conditions have brought attention to something called a sneckdown. “Sneckdown” is a portmanteau of “snow” and “neckdown,” a term for a part of the sidewalk, also known as a curb extension, that juts into the street, to protect pedestrians. The sneckdown is the snow that builds up on parts of the street that cars don’t use, acting as a natural curb extension. At intersections, it can be found mostly on corners, as the city pushes it one way and property owners push it the other. The sneckdown is also what people awkwardly have to step through as a result. Recently, I have encountered sneckdowns while going to work, going to the gym, popping to the store, hurrying for the bus, and on the way to a hard-to-get dinner reservation that a friend made, perhaps unwisely, weeks before the snowstorm. Almost any New Yorker who has to cross the street has become familiar with the sneckdown, often at a level just between the sock and the waterproof shoe. I saw my first sneckdown of the year on a corner of Gates Avenue, in Clinton Hill, a few yards from my apartment. The snow had stopped falling, and a plow had come through. My neighbors had shovelled their stoops. But there remained a solid mound of ice, curving out across the road, like a bumper on one side of a pool table. I walked out and tried to avoid becoming a billiard ball. Sneckdowns are something of a gray area, as they live partly on the sidewalk and partly on the street. They are where the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the state meet. It gets slippery. To some urbanists, a sneckdown offers a vision of a better world. The term was popularized by Clarence Eckerson, Jr., a documentarian who started filming sneckdowns in the early twenty-tens, for the pro-transit website Streetsblog. “It’s the space that is revealed that we could take back for other things,” Eckerson told me recently. Sneckdowns slow cars as they turn, and make pedestrians more visible. Ahead of the storm, Streetsblog called on readers to send photos of sneckdowns to the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to show him where the city could make more room for pedestrians. This past Tuesday, Eckerson ran around City Hall and his home, in Jackson Heights, hunting for the best sneckdowns, for a new video. He had a full shoulder-replacement surgery scheduled for the next day. That morning, he shot some pickups; an anesthesiologist fitted him with a mask a few hours later. “I’m very dedicated,” he told me over Zoom, his arm in a padded black sling. Out on the street, he’d seen a huge eighteen-wheeler truck, hauling Goya beans, bend around a sneckdown in Jackson Heights—and nail the turn with five or six feet of snow to spare. “You could take back some of it at the very least,” he said The other day, at the intersection of 174th Street and Broadway, in Washington Heights, I met Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Sanitation, to watch the destruction of a few sneckdowns. It was the sixth day in a row below freezing, and Goodman wore a green D.S.N.Y. jacket, a gray beanie, and duck boots. Together, we watched a skid steer, a maneuverable miniature excavator, attack a sneckdown that had built up on a street corner, near a gas station. Conditions were tough. Handheld tools sometimes broke. “These are one of the only things that can break an ice boulder,” Goodman told me. Not every pile of ice is a sneckdown. There is a complex taxonomy. (It helps to know your enemy.) Sanitation workers call sneckdowns corner caps. The narrow path through a sneckdown that lets people cross the street is known as a “curb cut.” A blocked-off bus stop is not a sneckdown. “I’ve seen people post their own photos and I’ll be, like, ‘Well that’s not a sneckdown,’ ” Eckerson told me. One helpful heuristic: if you can see tire tracks, it’s not a sneckdown—the cars have been using it. Whether the furrow of snow in a lane of parked cars is a sneckdown depends on your philosophical opinion of what the street is for. Most of the time, when people complain about lingering, no-man’s-land snow, they are complaining about something called the curbline. This is the snow that piles up between the cleared path of the sidewalk and the street, often against parked cars, maybe crowned with trash. Property owners don’t have to clear more than a four-foot-wide path, enough for a stroller or a wheelchair; the city doesn’t have to, either. Goodman told me it’s simple: if snow is on the street, it’s the city’s responsibility. If it’s on the sidewalk, it’s the property owner’s. But there are complications; the snow around a parked car is the responsibility of the driver—even though it’s on the street. If a bus stop is sheltered, the Department of Transportation is on the hook. A regular bus stop is the responsibility of the property owner whose place abuts the stop, but the city must insure that the bus can pull up to the curb. Previous mayors, Goodman told me, thought it was fine as long as the bus door could open. This year, Mamdani insisted to Sanitation that there be pedestrian access at every stop. On Broadway, a crew of emergency shovellers, whom the city pays a starting rate of $19.14 an hour, were deployed to another corner, outside a radiologist’s office. One shoveller, Anthony Gutierrez, who is normally a truck driver, was hacking away at a sneckdown with an ice scraper. Next to him, Daniel Johannes wore a bright orange vest that said “laborer” and an ushanka hat. “I have shovelling experience—I once excavated a big hole,” he told me. Johannes lives locally and usually works in construction. This was his third twelve-hour shift. “Our neighbors need to pass these streets,” he said, undeterred. Before the recent snowstorm, the city activated PlowNYC, a real-time map showing when every street in the city was last plowed. The computer program that tracks the snowplows is called Blade Runner. When it isn’t snowing, Sanitation uses it to track trash collection. This is because the vast majority of New York City’s snowplows are regular garbage trucks with a plow attached. The snowstorm presented an outlet for Mamdani’s embrace of “sewer socialism,” which focusses on everyday municipal problems. (It could also be a trip wire: the former mayor John Lindsay was pelted for poorly handling a blizzard in the sixties.) During the storm, Mamdani was shovelling out a car trapped near public housing in Bed-Stuy. The Governor, Kathy Hochul, told him to put on a hat. Javier Lojan, the acting commissioner of sanitation, told me that Mamdani was at morning roll call with the workers on the first day of the storm. (He said, of the mayor’s shovelling form, “He’s got to bend his knees a little more, maybe.”) Despite the murkiness of sneckdowns, sanitation workers often end up taking care of them. Back on Broadway, the ice on the corner was, technically, the business’s responsibility. “The fact that it’s on the corner doesn’t change the fact that it’s sidewalk,” Goodman told me. “But we’re doing it—we can’t leave it there.” Arguing about snow in subfreezing temperatures can remind you of the first law of thermodynamics—that snow can’t be created or destroyed. It has to go somewhere. The curbline may be ugly, but it is where property owners are supposed to put the snow—it’s out of the way. The city also doesn’t clear every sneckdown. “Not all sneckdowns are created equal,” Goodman said. “Some of them are not obstructing anything at all. They can just stay there.” Anyway, the sun usually deals with it for us. We’re only vexed by the sneckdowns now because it’s still freezing. “There is a Foucaultian aspect to it,” Goodman told me. “What’s public and what’s private isn’t inherent. It’s socially constructed. It’s shaped by cultural factors and the fact that it is below thirty-two degrees.” One way out could be simply to heat the ice. In New York, the city has snow melters, which are just slightly warm trucks, but are commonly called hot tubs. The melter sits over a sewer line, idling while heating the snow to thirty-eight degrees, barely above freezing, and drips the water directly into a drain. The city is running twelve melters; I visited one in Inwood, by the Harlem River, that handles all the snow in Manhattan above Fifty-ninth Street. When I arrived, the melter was surrounded by a pool of water, a few inches deep, which gently lapped against my shoes. Three twelve-foot-tall orange excavators took bites out of a mound of snow and ferried it to the hot tub. It had been so long since I had seen snow melt that it was almost intoxicating. The trucks hauling the snow frolicked in the water, sending dirty gray ripples toward me. I resisted the urge to run my hand through the slush. Usually, a sneckdown is a fleeting thing. But this year’s never-ending freeze showed that cars could still get around without the extra space. Do we want to live in a world carved out by the sneckdown? “I don’t want the snow there permanently,” Eckerson said. But, he asked, could we imagine the space where the ice sits transforming into concrete and trees, somewhere to rest, or a spot for children to safely cross the street? “You can make them pretty,” he said. “Bushes, trees, seating, if there’s a big enough street.” Earlier, in Washington Heights, I’d asked the shovellers whether they could imagine the sneckdown before them as something else. “I think that New York City is a pedestrian and transit city, so I’m a hundred per cent behind that,” Johannes, the construction worker, said. “But that takes up the space for the cars,” his fellow-shoveller, Gutierrez, said. “The traffic is a nightmare. It’s not good. You don’t get anywhere to park.” Gutierrez continued, “You fix one thing, you mess up the other stuff.” Over the days, I saw my local sneckdown more than I saw my friends and family. I watched it yellow slightly, like the fingers of a smoker. But on Monday I walked to Gates Avenue, and my sneckdown was gone. The curb showed evidence of scraping. I sailed through the intersection. It felt slightly unfair to me that it hadn’t been given an honest chance to melt. But the air was still frigid, and there was plenty of snow to step around. ♦
- alex 2-23-2026 4:49 pm [add a comment]
Sneckdown Piazza has a certain ring to it.
- steve 2-23-2026 8:43 pm [add a comment]
i wonder how many trees would really transform the city. says they planted 1000000 new ones since 2015 upping the canopy to 22% of the city. another million would be to 30%. still so many areas bereft.
- dave 2-23-2026 7:27 pm [add a comment]
Boots? Totes? Rubbers?
- bill 2-23-2026 10:31 pm [add a comment]
No galoshes for me, but for deep slushy conditions I've used knee-high rubber wellingtons with heavy over the calf socks. After the first storm when it was snowy and frigid I resorted to my insulated waterproof hiking boots which are normally reserved for the field. And after observing their utility in Bucks for years I broke down and got winter Blundstones, insulated and waterproof; been getting a lot of use from those in the cold, though they're short for the deepest drifts and piles. The worst thing is all the salt and chemical melts. The rubber boots can deal with it but leather needs maintenance to keep from getting salt burned and scarred.
- alex 2-24-2026 9:28 am [add a comment]
i was looking at these yesterday but id probably yet more use out of hiking boots.
- dave 2-24-2026 9:52 am [add a comment]
https://www.cabelas.com/p/lacrosse-alphaburly-pro-hunting-boots-for-men
these are my deep shit go to. Good mukluk
- bill 2-24-2026 11:13 am [add a comment]
Welcome to blue stone. I keep two pairs because they take so long to break in. A dress pair and the old beat up comfy ones. But last year I discovered Seavees and got a couple of ankle high pairs.
- bill 2-24-2026 11:17 am [add a comment]
id check your mapping app, bill.
i always think those slip ons wont fit well without lacing. tell me im wrong!
- dave 2-24-2026 11:24 am [add a comment]
I haven't found a pair of slip ons boots that I like. If they are big enough to slip over my heel and bridge they are too big once I get my foot in.
- steve 2-24-2026 10:24 pm [add a comment]