December 17, 2020
The much ballyhooed first snowfall of the holiday season, aka Winter Storm Gail, dumped just a few inches of the white stuff up here last night. Wind gusts whipped through Inwood beginning around midnight and continued till dawn as Department of Sanitation plow trucks noisily scraped the meager accumulation continuously all night long. Elsewhere Gail wasn’t as gentle: reports of up to three feet of snow in Binghamton and hundreds of car crashes in Virginia indicated that we missed the worst of it.
Daylight revealed a neat layer of the fresh flakes glistening in the bright sunshine and many family units heading into the park to ride sleds and make snow angels. But it wasn’t very deep or long lasting snow. In fact by early this afternoon it was already beginning to melt away. The digging out parked cars ritual was underway but unlike in some prior years, the snow banks that the plows had created overnight were not too steep. Half a foot of snow reportedly fell in Central Park, well short of the 12-18 inches that had been forecast.
