The Blizzard of 1888: The Storm that Created the New York City Subway

“It was as if New York had been a burning candle upon which nature had clapped a
Snuffer...leaving nothing of the city’s activity but a struggling ember.”
-The New York Times, Tuesday, March 13, 1888

One hundred and twenty years ago the New York City skyline looked very different than it does today.  Late Victorian-era New York was a city sheathed in a constant pall of smoke; covered by a blanket of dusty black coal soot.  It was a city made up almost entirely of brick, masonry and wood.  A city that moved via horse, elevated train and on foot with main streets of macadam cobblestone and dark muck filled back alleys.  Asphalt, the automobile, and the subway still remained in the not to distant future.

Had you stood on the New Jersey side and gazed across the Hudson, back then, you would have seen a short squat bustling city ready to leap skyward like a rottweiler poised to fight with the coming dawn of a new century.

The cityscape of 1888 was spreading outward in all directions.  Lower Manhattan, with Wall Street as its epicenter, was only surpassed by London as the Gilded Age’s capital of world finance and commerce.  And just across the East River, with a population approaching 1,000,000 souls in its own right, was Brooklyn, then considered to be the nation’s fourth largest city only a few steps behind its big brother just across the water to the west.

Gotham at the end of the 19th century was spreading east, west, north and south awaiting only the invention of stronger, more tactile steel girders and advances in urban architecture to move ever upward and become the vertical city that we know it to be today.

Gilded Age New York City, and its environs, was an ever expanding urban sprawl on the very cusp of modernity.  It was a city that had one foot in the past, but it was also a city that embraced new and burgeoning technologies.  Telephone and telegraph wires, newly installed electrical lines, criss-crossed the sky above closely packed tenements teeming with newly arrived immigrants from Russia, Italy, Sweden and seemingly all four corners of the known world.

New York was a growing city.  It was the true embodiment of a progressive community during what some historians have since considered to be America’s Progressive Era.  It was a city that appeared as if it couldn’t be stopped or held down by anything; rising above the streets below on elevated railway lines and reaching towards the heaven on telephone and telegraph poles.

Had you stood on the Jersey side and gazed across the Hudson on March 11, 1888, Manhattan would have appeared to be an ever-growing unstoppable force, but all of that would be about to change the very next day…

The clock struck midnight, Monday, March 12, 1888 and a misty rain was falling gently but steadily on the cobblestoned street of Broadway.  The temperature, for the moment, was holding steady at an unseasonably warm 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  Pools of water and slime composed of mud, straw, various refuse and horse manure formed on the side streets.  The few midnight revelers who were still out and about that night were forced to stagger home through a quagmire of muck nearly up their knees before being able to turn in for the night.

Not many people were out that night though, most remained indoors trying to catch the last few hours of sleep before the dawn and the start of the next, grinding work week.  The clop of horse’s hooves, the pitter-patter of a light rain and the occasional drunken peal of laughter was all that could be heard on that wet night of Monday, March 12, 1888.

  And then, suddenly, although few were actually outside to feel it, the temperature began to drop.  The temperature plummeted.  As the clock struck midnight, and on into the early morning hours, that misty rain turned into icy sleet and then blowing snow.  Wind gusts reached upwards of seventy miles an hour and the dark of night turned white.  From just past midnight, right up until dawn it snowed, and then it continued to snow, and wind continued to gust right past the hour during which the sun would have risen had anyone been able to see the dawn through those nearly apocalyptic weather conditions.

And oddly, early in the morning, because this was the year 1888, many men and women awoke and set about their business as if this were an ordinary early spring day.  In an era when the newspaper was the cutting edge of media mass communication, most late-Victorian New Yorkers who struggled day to day to make the most meager of living’s, got dressed and ready to head to the factory, the shop, the wharves, schools, offices and anywhere else that they happened to work simply because there was no way to call out.  Missing a day of work could mean losing your job permanently; having it stolen right out from under you by the next available person who had been able to struggle through the weather to get there. 

As the darkness of night gave way to a cloudy dawn snow continued to fall and temperatures continued to drop.  Around the time most people would have left their homes to head out to work they would have had to contend with near zero degree temperatures, wind gusts of over 70 miles per hour and continuing snowfall accumulation of up to 20 inches.

Worst of all, though, would have been the windblown snow drifts which built up against the sides of buildings and in some instances reached a reported height of up to fifty feet!  Years afterwards, whenever anyone recollected the blizzard of 1888, it was common for New Yorkers to refer to it as, “The Great White Hurricane” because no one could ever remember another storm that combined such heavy snowfall with such high winds.  In fact, although weather reporting technology was not as exact a science then as it is now, it is widely believed that wind gusts of such velocity would not be recorded in midtown for another 124 years until October of 2012 during Superstorm Sandy.

The speed of the snowfall, the force of the winds and the height of the snowdrifts in the city were a deadly combination.  Roscoe Conkling, a Republican Senator from New York, died on the night of the blizzard while walking home from an evening’s entertainment at the theater.  While he was walking the senator fell into a high snowdrift and that’s where his heart stopped beating and where he lay dead until his frozen body was discovered nearly forty-eight hours later.  In total the Blizzard of 1888 accounted for over 200 deaths in New York City alone and upwards of 500 deaths across the northeast corridor of the United States.

On the 12th of March 1888, all mechanized transport whether by rail or boat both into and out of the city had ground to a halt, but with the East River now frozen solid, hundreds of pedestrians began to walk both to and from the Brooklyn side.  Although warned by authorities not to do so because of the precarious nature of the newly frozen river, headstrong commuters not willing to be stranded at their office or shop all day and all night continued to use the ice coated East River as a pedestrian walkway.  This flow of traffic went smoothly through the morning, but then, sometime in the mid-afternoon as the snow continued to fall and the temperature rose ever so slightly a rustling sound could begin to faintly be heard.  This rustling sound continued for a few moments, but then instantly it was followed by a loud crack, like the sound of a thunderclap.  The ice of the frozen East River was breaking apart!  Dozens drowned as they were thrown into the deadly chill waters and hundreds more remained stranded for the better part of all day and all night on slowly moving ice floes.

Another place where would-be commuters became stranded was on the many elevated trains that criss-crossed the city’s boroughs.  In an age when every form of transport and communication was above ground, heavy wet and building snow in conjunction with hurricane force blowing winds caused everyone and everything to become stuck and stranded in place.  The going rate for use of a rickety ladder to get down from one of the elevated railways sky-rocketed to .50 cents (nearly $20 in today’s money) even for petticoated ladies at the height of the storm on March 12th.

If anything good could be said to come out of a devastating storm which cost hundreds of lives, it is the fact that the Blizzard of 1888 was the real driving force in the creation of the New York City subway system.

Back in the late 1860’s, New York City briefly introduced a primitive subway system called, “The Beach Pneumatic Transit” which was the brainchild of inventor Alfred Ely Beach. In post Civil War New York, particularly on Broadway the city’s main thoroughfare, being struck and killed by a horse or a runaway wheel that broke of its axle, was a real and present danger for unwary pedestrians.  In an effort to address the ever increasing hoof and foot traffic above, Beach and a group of private investors helped finance the construction of a single subway tube beneath Broadway that ran from Warren Street to Murray Street and consisted of a single car.

Although Beach’s Pneumatic Transit System did open on February 26, 1870 and run for nearly three years the project never really caught on from a practical perspective because of the new subway’s limited range, exorbitant cost at twenty-five cents per ride and the fact that it did not have the backing of Tammany Hall and New York’s Democratic political machine then led by Mayor Boss Tweed.  The Pneumatic Transit System served as more of an entertainment novelty for New York City’s well-to-do than it did as a practical transportation method.

It would take over fifteen more years, the fall of the Tammany Hall political machine, the backing of more open and civic minded politicians in addition to the transportation crisis created by the Blizzard of 1888 (not to mention another fifteen years of underground construction and innovation) until New York would unveil the world’s first practical and expansive underground subway system on October 27, 1904.

As a result of the Blizzard of 1888, not just subway lines and transportation would move underground, but slowly, as telephone communication replaced telegraph lines, and as electricity began to light up the ever-growing Manhattan skyline, the city’s infrastructure would adjust and develop underground, creating the vast subterranean city that we know today which supports the New York that we see above ground.

Despite a cost in damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars (which would approach over a billion dollars in today’s money) over 200 deaths, and the temporary halt of all transportation in the nation’s largest city, New Yorker’s would band together during the blizzard of 1888 and grow to look back upon this singular event almost fondly with nostalgia in later years.

Of course, during a snowfall of such magnitude, all of New York City’s schools were closed for several days or even weeks.  (Some snow drifts didn’t melt until May!)  The late nineteenth century was an era, when for the first time many children actually began to attend (somewhat) compulsory education.  The idea that mother nature could cause that compulsory education to suddenly halt would, for years to come, be remembered fondly by many who were children at the time.  Most recorded memories of the Blizzard of ‘88 come to use as grainy audio recordings from 1947, when New York would once again be rocked by a blizzard of mammoth proportions and enterprising reporters, both in print and radio, went about interviewing some of New York’s oldest citizens to get their views on the two contrasting storms.

Ever afterward the Blizzard of 1888, which at the time was called “The Great White Hurricane” and so ravaged the entire eastern seaboard of the United States would be remembered as the “The Children’s Blizzard” and as the storm that built a subway.

Today, in light of recent natural and man made disasters such as 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the twin towers the Blizzard of 1888 stands out as one of the first and finest examples of modern New Yorkers banding together as one to overcome crisis and hardship.  The tradition of innovation and cooperation that began among the citizens of America’s greatest and largest city in the late nineteenth century continues to echo all  the way down to the present day and it is embodied not only in the ways New Yorker’s responded to the terrible crises mentioned above, but also each and every time a world weary commuter travels or from work on the New York City Subway System.