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February 1977 | Volume 28, Issue 2
The Fastest Commuter In The East
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
The travails of getting to work during the blizzard were so severe that the New York Evening Sun gave front-page space to the remarkable story of a businessman who managed to make the trip from then fashionable Harlem to the City Hall area in only two hours and eleven minutes—”probably the fastest time on record for the day.” Despite the speed, the trip was not altogether without incident, as the man’s account demonstrates:
I left my house on 128th street and Sixth avenue at 9½ A.M. and at once discovered that it was snowing. I opened my umbrella, and a howling wind swept around the corner from Sixth avenue and took that umbrella out of my hand and lifted it over the roof of a neighboring flat house. Next my Derby hat flew off my head and went skimming over the snow drifts at the rate of about sixty miles an hour. I let it go, returned to my house, put on an old hunting cap, tied up my ears in a woollen muffler, and started out again to go to my business.…
I had to get down town, and I went to a livery stable to get a conveyance. There was one cutter, one horse, and one driver left. I hired all three for $15 and started out. That was at 10:20 o’clock. The driver told me that the horse was liable to run away if he got excited, but he didn’t get excited. Well, we started down Third avenue on a fast trot, and then the fun began. The air was so full of little fine needles of snow and the wind tore by us at such a rate that that horse staggered about like a drunken man. But he was game. He put his head down and trotted ahead in the teeth of the blast. His mane and tail were masses of ice, and his hide was thickly veneered with it. You know I wear eyeglasses. Well, my eyeglasses were covered with ice so thick that I had to lick it off every five minutes. I couldn’t get them clear any other way.
We passed Third avenue surface cars all the way down. They were all deserted and most of them were off the track. The horses had all been taken back to the stables. The brewers’ wagons were out, though, out in force, and each one had from four to ten great Normandy horses. Even the great strength of these huge draught animals was not enough to pull the wagons through some of the snow drifts, and the drivers were lashing the poor beasts with their whips and cursing them with great vigor. The sidewalks we-re almost deserted as well as I could see through my ice-covered glasses. As we kept moving southward at the great speed of four miles an hour, the sleet striking my face made me feel