NEW YORK CITY SNOW STORMS, 2004-2016
Subway train stuck on the Williamsburg Bridge due to frozen signals during blizzard, Dec. 26, 2010. Photo Credit: JB NIcholas.
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naugurating Throwback Thursdays with some snow. You’re missing it, The Free Lance has it. We’re your snow connection. Let it snow.
In honor of the record-breaking lack of snow in New York City this year, The Free Lance is taking you back to blizzards past. The first group of photographs is particularly poignant to me. They’re like a time capsule of Downtown Manhattan winter 2003-04. That winter was the first winter I got to walk around on the streets of New York in a blizzard in 13 years. I had just been released from prison the summer before. I was living on Sullivan Street, going to NYU. Downtown Manhattan was my backyard.
Photo Credits: JB Nicholas. Music: Sharon Van Etten, “Come Back.”
Life in New York then was magical. Anything could happen on any given night and none of it would be bad. The future was wide-open, beckoning.
The later photographs are from 2009-16. I was a professional news photographer by then and living in an artists’ loft in South Williamsburg with a Cuban painter who basically escaped one of Castro’s prisons. The last real cold, snowy winter I remember was 2015-16. There was a big blizzard in early February that dumped almost two feet of snow on the City. It stayed cold for weeks too. I went snowshoeing an hour north of the City on top of the Shawangunk Ridge and there was three feet of fresh powder.
No more. It hasn’t really snowed and been cold for weeks like that in New York City since. Like the bodegas, Crown Victoria cabs and warmly-glowing sodium-vapor street lamps pictured in some of the photographs, that New York is gone now. It’s been replaced by rising seas, cold LED lights, mercifully short, steel-grey days and cold rain. To the grand, great, snowy New York we lost. To the New York I lost.
Shout out Nan Goldin. Thank you Sharon Van Etten for such a beautiful song. You also filmed a video on my block (17) so I hope you don’t mind.
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