It’s snow way to usher in spring!
Brooklynites hoping for sunny skies on Wednesday as they began the second day of the season were dealt no warm embraces by Mother Nature, who pummeled parts of the borough with more than a foot of powder — the most dumped on New York City in spring in more than a century — during the fourth nor’easter to blow through the East Coast this month.
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, the winter storm that our friends at The Weather Channel named Toby dropped 12.7 inches of slushy stuff before it ended early Thursday morning, according to National Weather Service data — besting the record 10 inches that fell in the outer borough of Manhattan’s Central Park on April 3, 1915, according to the service.
The nor’easter harkened back to simpler snowy days of yesteryear, delivering gobs of white stuff amid heavy winds, but no titillating phenomena such as the bombogenesis or thundersnow that previous storms brought to Kings County this year.
Reporters in this newspaper’s Blizzard Bureau found some locals out and about shortly after the flakes started falling early Wednesday morning, such as Sunset Parkers Caroline Blehart and MG Proaps, who took a $1 piece of poster board to the hill of their nabe’s eponymous meadow before 11 am to catch some cheap thrills sledding down the incline on the arts-and-crafts supply.
And as the snow piled up, other Brooklynites got to work — including Department of Parks and Recreation employee James Gillespie, who, shovel in hand, began a day of clearing powder from paths in Sunset Park that he said would keep him in the green space until 8 pm, and shopkeeper Mohammed Uddin, who removed slush from the sidewalk outside his nearby Fifth Avenue deli.
Many Kings County kids, however, only lifted their fingers for as long as it took them to carry sleds to the closest hills, after Mayor DeBlasio closed all public schools ahead of the storm.
In Bay Ridge, youngsters Duran, Lyla, and Lelan Pepic said they spent the morning sliding down slopes in Owl’s Head Park with dad Al, and planned to return to the meadow later on with their black lab, Breezy, before finishing the day with some hot chocolate.
The storm continued its onslaught as day wore into night, dumping wet white blobs on straphangers making their evening commutes and amassing formidable 11-inch drifts in East Flatbush and 8.5-inch banks in Park Slope before it petered out, according to the Weather Service.
But with temperatures expected to reach around 45 degrees on Thursday before hovering there through the weekend, the blanket of white over the borough is likely to melt away as quickly as it came as spring settles in.
