New York City's Coldest Day and the Hard Winter in Northern New Jersey: February 9, 1934

 

The temperature in Central Park first dropped below zero degrees Fahrenheit at 9 pm on Thursday, February 8, 1934 and it kept dropping for ten straight hours!

Just after sunrise, at 7 in the morning on Friday, February 9, 1934, the National Weather Service officially recorded the temperature in New York City as -15 degrees Fahrenheit.

The New York Times would report the next day that the temperature in Central Park was, in fact, a balmy -14.3 degrees at 7 o’clock in the morning.

February 9, 1934 was, and still is, the coldest day on record for New York City and it’s metropolitan area.  Since accurate temperature data first started to be recorded by the National Weather Service at Central Park in 1871, there have been 58 days during which the temperature has been at or below zero degrees Fahrenheit in midtown Manhattan, with the most recent of these days being January 18, 1994 when the temperature reached -2 degrees.

But February 9, 1934 still remains the coldest of them all.

On that day the temperature never got above 6 degrees and it remained over 40 degrees below average for almost two entire days!

        Surprisingly, for better or worse, school remained open that day.

Over 600 cases of frostbite were treated at New York area hospitals on February 9, 1934.  The vast majority of frostbite cases that day came  from police officers most of whom still had to walk their beats on foot back in 1934, or from  children who either neglected to wear gloves as they walked to school that morning or simply didn’t have any gloves to wear because their parents couldn’t afford any during the depths of the Great Depression.

In an interview with The New York Times on February 10, 1934 in an effort to reassure a down-trodden, unemployed and broke public, New York City Welfare Commissioner William Hodson tried to comfort those countless thousands without a roof over their heads by saying that, “(W)ith municipal lodging houses, private charities and the commercial lodging houses we are more than able to care for every homeless man and woman in this city.”

Hodson’s words would prove dubious at best.

William Hodson

        Six people died in New York City that day as a result of exposure.

Many more were hospitalized due to carbon monoxide poisoning.  Since many New Yorker’s during the Depression did not have access to adequate indoor heating, groups of people took to huddling together inside parked and running cars to stay warm and many passed out unconscious as a result.

To add insult to injury, in the winter of 1934 New York City’s cab drivers were on strike, forcing even well-to-do Manhattanites to walk outside and brave the deadly bitter cold temperatures.

The Hudson and East Rivers were choked by ice and Coast Guard cutters couldn’t get through to provide assistance to the city’s beleaguered emergency services.

Firefighters in the City were summoned to dozens of false alarms as the frigid temperatures caused sprinkler systems throughout public buildings in Manhattan to freeze and malfunction.  Fire engines hurried throughout the day from street corner to street corner in a vain attempt to thaw out the City’s hundreds of frozen and inoperable hydrants.

All of the northeast United States was crippled by the record breaking cold on the 9th of February 1934.

        The Daily Star of Oneonta, New York, reported the next day that, “the New York Harbor was frozen with ice.  Lake Ontario was frozen solid for the first time in over 60 years.”

In Rochester, New York, a low temperature of -29 degrees was recorded and it was said that people were able to drive their cars on the ice from Rochester all the way to Toronto!  Provided they could even get their cars to start in the subzero weather that is.

Nine out of ten National Weather Service stations located in New York and New Jersey would record absolute temperature lows that day.  Ridgewood, New Jersey, located about 10 miles as the crow flies from Manhattan, in Bergen County, would reach -17 degrees Fahrenheit.

From December of 1933 until April of 1934 the largest employer, as a result of The Great Depression, in Bergen County New Jersey was the Civil Works Administration or CWA.  At its height the CWA employed approximately 1,000 Bergen County residents each day, most of whom worked on construction of the Palisades Interstate Park System.

The Palisades Interstate Park is a twelve mile long, 2,500 acre park system that stretches throughout most of Bergen County along the banks of the Hudson River across from New York City.  During the winter of 1933/34, thankful to have any type of employment at all, thousands of New Jerseyians worked on construction of this park system each and every day despite the fact that throughout all of February of 1934 the average daily temperature never once exceeded 20 degrees.

Work on the Palisades Interstate Park System continued throughout the entire day on February 9, 1934.  On that day 500+ workers swung pickaxes and operated frozen digging equipment in an effort to excavate obsolete septic systems in and around present day Alpine, New Jersey as work on the Park expanded to include a major new roadway, the Palisades Interstate Parkway.

Construction on the Palisades Interstate Park 1934

        The Civil Works Administration construction of both the Palisades Interstate Park and the Palisades Interstate Parkway would be completed on time in April of 1934.  To this day Palisades Interstate Park is a beautiful landscape, one that combines the pastoral with the urban and the historic. It remains popular with nature lovers, photographers and tourists.  But for those New Jerseyians who worked through the snow and frigid temperatures during the winter of 1934, that season in the midst of The Great Depression would always be remembered as “the Hard Winter”.

It wouldn’t be until after 2 in the afternoon on the 9th of February 1934 that temperatures in Manhattan would finally rise above zero degrees. In the afternoon the high temperature would hit 6 degrees.  Twenty-four hours after that, by midday on February 10th, the temperature would reach a downright scorching 27 or a full 42 degrees warmer than it had been just the day before!

Prior to February 9, 1934 the coldest day ever recorded at Central Park had occurred on December 30, 1917 when a low of -12 degrees was reached, which by the way, remains the second coldest day ever in New York City.

At the time the National Weather Service speculated that February 9, 1934 might have been the coldest day in New York City and its environs since at least the American Revolution! 

As with most things, memories of weather events tend to fade with time, or become blurred together until it’s hard to tell when the coldest, warmest, wettest or driest actually occurred.  But I’m sure that for all of those tri-state area residents who actually lived through it the “Hard Winter” of 1934 in general and February 9 in particular were tough to forget.  And thankfully, we all have the National Weather Service which has faithfully been recording the temperature every day at Central Park for the last 150 years to help us all remember.