Blizzard Stories 1969

In February 1969, I had just turned 14 years of age. We were still living in our first house on 215th Street, not going to move to the house next door until late that spring. My dad was a supervisor for the Department of Sanitation in NYC still at that time, responsible for the north east section of Queens that included his old town of College Point and the area of Whitestone.

The storm hit NYC on late Friday night, February 9th and continued until early Sunday morning. I can remember standing on the side of the house looking at snow drifts that were easily 14 feet high. New York City officially got 21 inches of snow from that storm but some areas of the city saw close to 30 inches of the white stuff. I can remember we sledded on that snow for weeks.

This is the storm that cost John Lindsay, the mayor at that time, reelection in 1972. The city was a disaster, with unplowed roads, non-moving traffic and a nightmare to recover from. This is similar to what just happened a few weeks ago in the city. One would think that a mayor would have learned from his predecessors. What is it they say, “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” Everything I am about to say, could be said about this most recent storm in NYC. Only the names and dates have been changed to protect the innocent.

As I mentioned, my dad was a Sanitation Superintendent fort the northeast Queens. I can remember him talking before that storm about how the city didn’t want to pay a lot of overtime to the workers so they waited and waited until sometimes it was almost too late. This happened again in this storm and this time the city bigwigs got caught and they paid. Normally if there was a storm like this coming my dad would have been called in Friday afternoon for planning sessions and then sent home to rest in order to return Saturday morning, expecting to work 24 hours or more straight,. He didn’t get the call Friday and he came home, business as usual for the weekend. It was only mid morning on Saturday that he got called in. By then the snow was already a problem as the regular workers, skeleton crew was not able to keep up with the storm snow removal. My dad talked about cars stuck in the streets and the men not being able to plow and what a mess it was.

In the meantime, sections of Manhattan were well plowed and taken care of. This led to charges that the rich neighborhoods in the city got preferential treatment about snow removal, In a foreshadowing of George Bush’s Katrina fly over, the mayor did a tour of some NYC neighborhood hardest hit and was booed in some areas. He was politically devastated and lost the following year’s Republican primary for mayor, ending up running and losing as a third party candidate. Sections of Queens were still not plowed a week after the storm.

As Yogi Berra once said “It sounds like déjà vu all over again!”