Stop whining about snow: New York's "Great Blizzard of 1888"

New York's West 11th street, at Waverly Place.

You think you've had a bad winter this year, Chicago  New York, or Boston?  Stop complaining.  You're not even close.  


Starting just after midnight on March 12, 1888, New York City broke the record.  What became the Great Blizzard of 1888 brought 75-mile-per-hour winds, zero-degree temperatures, and a rousing 40 inches of snow to the City.  Nearby New Jersey and Connecticut got fifty inches.  Snow drifts were measured up to 40 feet, burying entire houses.    Telegraphs and railroads broke down, communications froze, and over 400 people died in the cold, including 200 just in New York.  Thousands were isolated in their houses, unable to get out.  Many starved to death.  Estimated properly losses topped $25 million (over a billion in modern money).  


And that's just the start.  This was, after all, 1888.  That meant no snowplows, no street salt, no central heat, and no city help (unless you paid off your local Tammany Hall politico).  If you got cold, you snuggled with your spouse.  If you got hurt, you sucked it up and kept shoveling.  


Among the celebrity victims was Roscoe Conkling, the former US Senator  practicing law in at the time.  Conkling refused to pay $50 for a horse-drawn buggy to take him home that day.  Instead he fought his way for hours through two miles of chest-deep snow until reaching Madison Square Park, where he fell unconscious, dying a few days later.  A statute of Conkling marks the spot today.


The well-known photo above was shot by Cranmer C. Langill, a commercial photographer who at the time had a shop on East Fourteenth Street.  (Click on it to see full size and enjoy the detail.)  Who is the little girl standing on the sidewalk?  I wish we knew.

Portraits: James A. Garfield's inaugural ball, March 1881

Here’s a snapshot I took recently of a rarely seen two-page spread from the Leslie’s Illustrated of March 19, 1881. It took a team of artists to sketch and then carve it by hand onto wooden block for printing. It shows the grand inaugural ball for PresidentJames A. Garfield, held in the Smithsonian Building that year. Garfield, a popular and moderate Ohio Republican, was doomed to serve only four months in office before a psychopathic hanger-on named Charles Guiteau shot him in the back as Garfield was entering the Washington, D.C. train station on a Saturday morning that July. Garfield would die from infection (yes, the doctors killed him by failing to wash their hands) a few months later on September 19, 1881. His assassination would shock the nation and make Garfield widely popular for a generation. There is hardly a town or city in America with a Garfield Street or two.

Click on the photo to blow it up and marvel at the detail. So accurate is the sketch that you can make out literally dozens of prominent faces in the crowd: Garfield, his wife Lucretia, Senators Roscoe Conkling, John Sherman, and Carl Schurz, plus incoming Vice President Chester Alan Arthur, incoming Secretary of State James G. Blaine, and a bevy of foreign diplomats. Look at the women’s gowns, the bunting on the walls, the guarded conversations. The band that night played tunes from the latest Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore — Garfield’s favorite. — that had premiered in London just two years earlier.

It’s a group portrait of a vanishing generation of politicians taken at a moment of graceful indulgence. Could any photograph or video have captured the moment so well?

Eric Holder: "Nation of Cowards"? Not Really.

Eric Holder, the new Attorney General, raised hackles in Washington, D.C. yesterday for calling Americans a "national of cowards" on race relations, pointing to failures to build inter-racial ties outside the workplace. I certainly respect Holder for raising a sensitive and important issue. But on the history, I think he's wrong.