Finding Aid: The Great Blizzard of 1888
Placing a street scene from after the storm.
The scene
Late into the evening of Sunday, March 11, 1888, temperatures dropped sharply, turning heavy rain into snow and signaling the start of one of the most severe winter storms in the history of New York City. On Tuesday, the New York Times breathlessly recounted a city “In a Blizzard’s Grasp”:
Before the day had well advanced, every horse car and elevated railroad in the city had stopped running; the streets were almost impassable to men or horses by reason of the huge masses of drifting snow; the electric wires — telegraph and telephone — connecting spots in this city or opening communication with places outside were nearly all broken; hardly a train was sent out from the city or came into it during the entire day; the mails were stopped, and every variety of business dependent on motion or locomotion was stopped.
Life during the blizzard was chaotic: the New York Stock Exchange closed for two days; fifty-two foot drifts were reported in Gravesend, Brooklyn; intrepid Brooklynites crossed the East River on foot, after an ice floe became lodged near the Brooklyn Bridge.
By the time the storm broke on Wednesday, the Great Blizzard of 1888 had dropped over twenty inches of snow, paralyzing much of the East Coast and contributing to the deaths of at least 200 New Yorkers.
Photographs from the immediate aftermath of the storm show a streetscape littered with downed telegraph poles, which clogged traffic and created dangerous conditions for pedestrians. These scenes prompted renewed calls to move cable infrastructure underground; by the end of the century, Manhattan’s telegraph lines were safely below street level.
The Shot
This photograph, credited to Langill & Bodfish (the Manhattan firm of photographer C.C. Langill), shows a street scene in the days after the blizzard, with a snapped telegraph pole suspended over a Manhattan intersection. It neatly captures the hazard posed by above-ground telegraph lines, even after much of the snow had melted and New Yorkers, blurred by the camera’s long exposure, had resumed their daily activities.
It’s a perfect photo for Urban Archive: an everyday record that puts a historic event in context. As we look at this image 129 years later, a simple question needs to be answered: Where?
The center of the composition provides two important clues:
In the foreground, a street sign marks Avenue A. In 1888, Avenue A ran between Houston and 24th Streets downtown. Uptown, York Avenue and Sutton Place were also known as Avenue A. That leaves some 62 intersections for further study.
Beyond the Avenue A sign is the second clue: an elevated railway station at the next intersection. The cameraman was facing west (there were no elevated lines east of Avenue A), toward one of four Second Avenue El stations along First Avenue: First, Eighth (St. Mark’s Place), 14th, or 19th Street.
We’ll assess the candidates by matching the buildings on either side of the mystery block to contemporaneous maps. Here, we’re looking for a key feature: a nearly uniform row of five-story tenements lining the uptown side of the block.
1. 19th Street
Using G.W. Bromley’s 1891 Atlas of New York, we can rule out 19th Street. On the uptown side, P.S. 29 is missing from the shot; on the downtown side, unbuilt lots housing an American Carbonate Company coal yard would have been visible. This rules out 19th Street.
2. Eighth Street
Along Eighth Street, a number of buildings are either set back from the street or of irregular width. This rules out Eighth Street.
3. First Street
First Street appears plausible, but two areas raise questions. On the south side, two frame dwellings (in yellow) sit next to a vacant lot. It’s difficult to be certain, but there does not appear to be a three-lot-wide gap in the photo.
On the uptown side, several buildings on the western end have wood-frame additions at the rear (also yellow), indicating a possible difference in construction, compared to the eastern half of the block.
A look at the 1903 Sanborn Co. insurance map confirms this suspicion: many of the tenements on First Street have only three stories. This rules out First Street.
4. 14th Street
That leaves a single candidate standing: 14th Street. A quick check of the Sanborn map reveals the feature we’ve been looking for: a row of seventeen five-story tenements, each between 54–56’ tall:
By studying the Bromley and Sanborn maps, we’ve made a strong case for the corner of 14th Street and Avenue A. But maps are static documents, and our two best sources were published three and fifteen years after the photograph was taken. That’s plenty of time for buildings to rise and fall, for a variety of reasons. We need photographic proof.
Returning to the photo, the corner building at far left (225 Avenue A) has two discernible features: a mounted advertisement for Meltzer Bros. beer and a booth-like entrance protruding from the facade. The corner building was likely a saloon or restaurant.
A quick search for “225 Avenue A” reveals the smoking gun: a photo, ca. 1920, of No. 225 Avenue A, complete with a ground floor saloon and the projected entrance structure seen in the 1888 photograph.
After the storm was over, the cameraman — most likely C.C. Langill — went for a walk on 14th Street to survey the damage and took a few photographs along the way. More than a century later, the tenements, trains, and telegraph poles he captured are all gone.
