What Happens When the Snow Doesn’t Melt?
The other day, at the intersection of 174th Street and Broadway in Washington Heights, I met Joshua Goodman, deputy commissioner of the Department of Sanitation, to watch some sneckdowns being destroyed. It was the sixth consecutive day below zero and Goodman wore a green DSNY jacket, gray beanie and duck boots. Together we watched a maneuverable mini excavator attack a sneckdown that had formed on a street corner near a gas station. The conditions were difficult. Portable tools sometimes broke down. “It’s one of the only things that can break a block of ice,” Goodman told me.
Not all ice piles are sneckdowns. There is a complex taxonomy. (It helps to know your enemy.) Sanitation workers call sneckdowns corner caps. The narrow path across a sneckdown that allows people to cross the street is known as a “sidewalk cut.” A blocked bus stop is not a sneckdown. “I’ve seen people post their own photos and I’ll be like, ‘Well, that’s not a sneckdown,’” Eckerson told me. A useful heuristic: if you can see tire tracks, it’s not a sneckdown: the cars used it. Whether the furrow of snow in a lane of parked cars is a sneckdown depends on your philosophical opinion of the street’s purpose.
Most of the time when people complain about lingering snow and no man’s land, they are complaining about something called curbside. This is the snow that accumulates between the cleared sidewalk path and the street, often against parked cars, perhaps crowned with trash. Property owners do not need to clear a path wider than four feet, sufficient for a stroller or wheelchair; the city doesn’t have to either.
Goodman told me it’s simple: If there’s snow on the street, it’s the city’s responsibility. If it’s on the sidewalk, it’s the owner’s. But there are complications; snow around a parked car is the driver’s responsibility, even if it is on the street. If a bus stop is sheltered, the Ministry of Transport is responsible. A regular bus stop is the responsibility of the owner whose location is adjacent to the stop, but the City must ensure that the bus can stop right up to the sidewalk. Previous mayors, Goodman told me, thought everything was fine as long as the bus door could open. This year, Mamdani insisted to Sanitation that there be pedestrian access at each stop.
On Broadway, a team of emergency shovelers, which the city pays starting at $19.14 an hour, were deployed on another corner, in front of a radiologist’s office. A shoveler, Anthony Gutierrez, who is usually a truck driver, was attacking a sneckdown with an ice scraper. Next to him, Daniel Johannes wore a bright orange vest with “worker” written on it and a ushanka hat. “I have experience shoveling: I once dug a big hole,” he told me. Johannes lives locally and usually works in construction. It was his third twelve-hour shift. “Our neighbors have to use these streets,” he said undeterred.
Before the recent snowstorm, the city activated PlowNYC, a real-time map showing when every city street was last plowed. The computer program that tracks snowplows is called Blade Runner. When it doesn’t snow, Assainissement uses it to monitor waste collection. Indeed, the vast majority of snow plows in New York City are regular garbage trucks equipped with a snow plow.
The snowstorm provided an outlet for Mamdani’s embrace of “sewer socialism”, which focuses on everyday municipal problems. (This could also be a tripwire: Former Mayor John Lindsay was bombed for mishandling a snowstorm in the ’60s.) During the storm, Mamdani was clearing a stuck car near public housing in Bed-Stuy. The governor, Kathy Hochul, told him to put on a hat. Javier Lojan, the acting sanitation commissioner, told me that Mamdani was on morning roll call with workers on the first day of the storm. (He said, of the mayor’s shoveling form, “Maybe he needs to bend his knees a little more.”)
