Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died the night of May 19, 1994 at her Manhattan apartment. Cause of death was non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which had been made public a few months earlier. Her death came one month after the death of former president Richard Nixon (who JFK defeated for president in 1960). Jackie's death is particularly memorable for me because it coincided with the death of my father.
Dad sufferred from a rare degenerative disease of the brain known as supranuclear palsy for about 10 years - the same condition actor Dudley Moore sufferred from. On Mother's Day he was hospitalized for a mild heart attack and two weeks later I visited him and my mother for the weekend. (Up until this hospital stay my mother had taken care of my father at home.)
I heard the news about Jackie's death (at the age of 64) during the 11:00 news while packing for my trip and I read more about it the next morning while waiting to board my flight to Pittsburgh at Newark Airport. On the last day of my visit Mom, Dad and I watched some of her funeral from Dad's hospital room. The next day, May 24, Dad died unexpectedly, two months shy of his 70th birthday. I returned to Pittsburgh the following day to help my brother, sister and mother with funeral preparations.
Spring had arrived two weeks earlier, the 1982 baseball season had begun the day before and Easter was less than a week away. Yet here it was April 6 and we were under a blizzard warning, the first ever issued for New York in April. Rain began overnight, changed over to wet snow by a.m. rush hour and then the blizzard's full fury set in from 10AM-4PM. Most offices closed at noon, and the Mets and Yankees cancelled their season openers. I stayed at the office (ad agency Young & Rubicam) because I lived in Manhattan and getting home wasn't an issue.
That evening when I emerged from the PATH station in my Greenwich Village neighborhood I turned the corner onto my street and was amazed by the drifts I had to trudge through to get home. However, despite the snow the bowling league I participated in at Bowlmor Lanes still met.
Although Central Park had 9.6" of snow many suburbs reported a foot or more (Albany had 17.3"). It was NYC's biggest snowfall in four years. By midnight the temperature had fallen to a record 21 degrees.
The next day not much in the way of snow melt occurred as the temperature stayed below freezing all day - as opposed to a typical high in early April approaching 60 degrees. (By contrast, on the same date 28 years later NYC reported its earliest 90-degree reading.) Three days later I flew home to visit my parents in Pittsburgh for Easter and it was snowing there (two inches fell). Thankfully, this wasn't a precursor of an unusually cold April as a string of mild days occurred mid-month and then on April 25 the mercury hit 82 degrees.
If you love reading about snow, I've written five other posts about New York snowstorms:
And if you'd like to read about other New York City snowstorms, I've written a post on my weather blog, NYC Weather Archive, that recaps the snowstorms we've experienced since the winter of 1978/79. To go to it please click here.
Hale-Bopp was one of the brightest comets to streak across the skies in the 20th century. And unlike Kohoutek, a much hyped comet that turned out to be a big dud in the winter of 1973-74, H-B lived up to its hype. A survey conducted by Sky & Telescope Magazine reported that 69% of Americans had seen it during the winter & spring months of 1997. (The photo to the right was taken in the lower Hudson River Valley).
I was thrilled to catch a glimpse of Hale-Bopp, especially since star gazing in Manhattan can be a frustrating experience due to the glare from the city's lights. It was Wednesday evening at around 7:30 and I was doing my thrice-weekly 5-mile jog along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. In the Battery Park City neighborhood I noticed a man pointing his telescope across the river in the direction of Jersey City.
I glanced over my shoulder and was stunned to see a slash of light not far above the horizon. It seemed to be holding still in the sky and had the classic comet's tail. I stopped running to gaze at it further and then detected a slight, jerky horizontal motion. It was a very Zen moment. (My sighting occurred one day after the comet's closest approach to the sun, aka "perihelion".)
A week before my sighting the comet figured prominently in a mass suicide carried out by members of a religious cult known as Heaven's Gate. 39 members, mostly young adults, and the cult's elderly leader Do (pronounced "doe") committed the act in a rented mansion in an affluent suburb of San Diego. A videotape made shortly before the suicides indicated that a spaceship following behind H-B would pick up their souls. It was done in a very orderly manner and the victims were dressed in a similar fashion, which included wearing the identical Nike sneakers.
This was also an interesting time in my life (perhaps the comet had something to do with it). With my 40th birthday looming in May an ex-boyfriend from 10 years earlier reappeared. "David the Israeli", as I referred to him, was now living in Chicago (not far from Wrigley Field) and suggested I consider moving there as well. (I attached "the Israeli" to his name because there was a multitude of Davids in my life at the time, i.e. my roommate, boss and a number of co-workers, so to avoid confusion they each had their own descriptor.) At the last minute he joined me and my friend Tom when we went to San Francisco on vacation in March. (That's me with David on Lombard St. I'm the tall one.) Then at the end of April I visited him in Chicago (my first time there).
It was a whirlwind six weeks but, alas, it didn't work out this time either as the same dispiriting patterns re-emerged (his, of course). And no appearance from a comet was going to magically change him. Speaking of comets, if you'd like to learn even more about them the book The Greatest Comets talks about famous ones through history.
On February 26, 1993 New York, and the nation, was shaken by the terrorist bombing in a parking garage at the World Trade Center. Two weeks later Mother Nature was preparing her own assault as a monster storm swept up the East Coast. I didn't pay much attention to news of the impending storm until the night before it hit, a Friday. After work I had gone out with friends to Splash, a sprawling new gay bar in Chelsea. Once home I turned on the Weather Channel to hear about the approaching "white hurricane". (And the first day of Spring was just one week away).
The storm's full fury hit NYC Saturday morning (March 13) and continued thru mid-afternoon. (This photo, near my apartment in Greenwich Village, was taken at around noontime.) However, after ten inches of snow had fallen a changeover to sleet and rain began in the late afternoon, keeping the accumulation down. I was outside when the changeover began and the sleet pellets really stung because they were being propelled horizontally by 40-60 mph wind gusts. The noise the sleet created as it lashed against the windows in my apartment was deafening. I was concerned that my floor to ceiling living room window might blow in so I pulled down the blind.
Happily, I suffered no window damage, but after the storm subsided (at around midnight) that's when my problems started. Hearing a dripping sound I looked up and saw that the ceiling in one corner of my living room was cracking and buckling. It turned out that the snow on the roof (I lived on the top floor) had piled up high enough to cover a drain pipe, so melting snow had nowhere to go and collected in one spot.
I was thankful to be home so I could move my sofa and TV out of harm's way. However, I couldn't get in touch with my building super so I had to make due with a collection of pots and pans to collect the dripping water. However, the steady "ping" of the dripping made sleep nearly impossible. The next morning I got up early and found the super shoveling snow. He was unable to go up on the roof and clear the blockage because snow was drifted against the door so he brought up two large trash bins to my apartment to collect the water which pored out when he poked a few holes in my ceiling.
Compared to other parts of the Eastern U.S. New York was spared paralyzing amounts of snow (a nearby street in my neighborhood is pictured). Elsewhere, however, there were record accumulations not only in the Northeast (Pittsburgh had 26", Syracuse 36") but in the South as well, e.g., Atlanta had 9"; Birmingham 13"; Chattanooga 23". Even Mobile, Alabama on the Gulf Coast reported three inches of snow! The Weather Channel would later rank the storm, which affected nearly half of the U.S. population and left more than 250 dead, as one of the top five weather events of the entire 20th century.
If you'd like to read about other New York City snowstorms I've written a post on my weather blog, NYC Weather Archive, that recaps the snowstorms we've experienced since the winter of 1978/79. To go to it please click here. And on this blog I've written post on four other famous NYC snowstorms:
It was Friday and the streets of Manhattan were a sloppy mess following a snowstorm the day before that dumped nearly nine inches of wet snow (the biggest snowfall of a relatively snowless winter). But the day's big story was the evening's broadcast of The CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite's last as its revered anchorman. I caught the last five minutes of this newscast after getting in from work (ad agency Scali McCabe Sloves).
Cronkite's retirement sticks with me largely because his final week on the air coincided with a big life event for me. After living in Bayonne, New Jersey for two years I had moved into Manhattan earlier in the week. Truth be told, it was an impulsive decision made after my brother got married at the beginning of February. We both lived in Bayonne, so when he moved to another town I figured it was a good time to move into the "big city". I put an ad in the Village Voice and ended up in a peculiar living situation with a family in their TriBeCa loft at 60 Lispenard St., a dreary alley-like street out of a Dickens novel, just south of Canal St. It was me and the Sears family: artist-husband David, his Harvard educated stay-at-home wife Linda (a real chatterbox), their curly red-haired baby Jonah ... and a vicious white cat named Mouse.
I lived there for just three months when the landlord pressured us to move because he wanted to convert the building to commercial-use only. (He was probably the one behind our loft being burglarized a month after I moved in.) Happily, I found a much better situation up in the West Village in a 2-bedroom apartment with another family of sorts - Gary and Jason and their doberman Sabrina. The Sears family moved as well, but Mouse was left behind after he jumped across the air shaft and sat on the windowsill of the neighboring building - and that's where he stayed.
After retiring Cronkite kept a low-keyed presence in the news arena but narrated the occasional documentary and served as a pundit regarding his views on the changing news media. (He memorably had a number of unflattering things to say about his replacement, Dan Rather, in a CNN interview and an article in The New Yorker, shortly before Rather's retirement in 2005). Naturally, he penned a best-selling book, A Reporter's Life, in which he revisited some of the key historical moments that he was a part of as a reporter. Cronkite lived to be 92 and died in the summer of 2009.
I graduated from Penn State University on March 3 1979 but the occasion wasn't tied to any momentous historical event. Rather, my commencement took place at the height of the disco dancing frenzy sweeping the nation. At the time it seemed that Top-40 radio was playing nothing but wall-to-wall disco, e.g. songs such as YMCA; I Will Survive; Shake Your Groove Thing; Le Freak; and Do Ya Think I'm Sexy just to name a few. The Village People (whose first LP I bought in the spring of 1978) even appeared on the the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
After a celebratory lunch in State College with my parents, brother and sister, rather than return home to Pittsburgh I went east with my brother to his place in Bayonne, NJ. (It would serve as my home base while I went on job interviews in Manhattan for a position in advertising.) As we drove he played a cassette he had made from the wildly popular New York disco station WKTU. As I caught a glimpse of the Manhattan skyline at sunset Sister Sledge's song He's the Greatest Dancer came on the air.
Four months later a backlash to disco music began, largely a reaction by listeners with more rock-oriented musical tastes (and who helped make My Sharona a big hit later that summer). It was epitomized by "Disco Demolition Night" at Chicago's Comiskey Park on July 12 when a riot ensued after thousands of disco records were blown up as part of a radio station promotion (between games of a doubleheader). However, gay, black and Latin audiences, who first embraced disco music in underground clubs in the early 1970's, would continue to do so for years to come as it evolved into hybrids such as Eurodisco, hi-NRG and electronica.
It was lunchtime on a gray and unseasonably cold Friday with a touch of snow in the air. Our intern Sherida and I were heading to a business lunch with an account executive from the Fox TV network at Pietrasanta, a nearby restaurant at the corner of 9th Ave./46th St. As we walked the four blocks from our office at Worldwide Plaza (we worked at ad agency NWAyer) we noticed a plume of smoke rising in the distance from lower Manhattan. There was also a lot of noise from the blaring horns and sirens of fire trucks racing down the street.
After returning from lunch I heard the news about a truck bomb exploding in the underground parking garage of the North tower of the World Trade Center and realized that was where the smoke was coming from. It was chilling to hear speculation that the goal of the bomb was to collapse the North tower and have it fall into the South tower. Unfortunately, as bad as this attack was (6 died, more than 1,000 injured), it was just a prelude to the horror of the attacks on 9-11.
Renowned environmental artist Christo's widely publicized outdoor installation known as "The Gates" was unveiled in Central Park on February 12, 2005 (a Saturday). At my friend Tom's suggestion we hopped on the #1 subway at noon and went up to the park to experience it for ourselves (that's me in the photo).
I didn't quite know what to make of this "art" and didn't find it particularly pretty. The "gates" were made from a canvas-like fabric which was a safron/orange color, giving the gates somewhat of a harsh, industrial look (but ING Bank was probably delighted to have its corporate colors on display without paying for a sponsorship). Nonetheless, there was a sense of wonderment to this ambitious undertaking and its 7,500 fabric gates covering twenty-three miles of the park. Tom and I each got one of the small square fabric samples handed out as keepsakes.
Because the sky was overcast the colors really popped. This was great for picture taking and it's likely that most everyone living in Manhattan has a stash of photos snapped (or video clips posted on You Tube) at this out of the ordinary exhibit. After spending nearly 90 minutes wandering park trails a chill finally settled into our bones and we took our leave and went to lunch. We were two of the estimated one million visitors who had come to gaze at "The Gates" in its opening weekend. Later on during the installation's second, and final, week it took on a softer look after two significant snowfalls blanketed the park. All in all, it was a unique and pleasant diversion in the dead of winter.
Despite a cold start the winter of 2005-06 had turned into a relatively mild one. In fact, during a 7-week period beginning just after Christmas temperatures averaged nearly 10 degrees above average - and January was the thirdrd mildest on record. So it was somewhat of a shock when a major snowstorm came calling.
The first flakes began falling Saturday evening just as I was leaving a movie in the Lower East Side. (Steven Soderbergh's indie film Bubble). By midnight about three inches had fallen. The snow continued until mid-afternoon Sunday, but the bulk of it fell in a 6-hour period between 5-11AM when an incredible 18 inches fell (a ski resort-like snowfall rate of three inches/hour). The storm's total was 26.9", breaking the old record from December 26-27, 1947 by one-half inch. Since NYC was in the "bullseye" no other locality received nearly this much. At around noon on Sunday I ventured out with my camera and spent an hour or so in Washington Square Park snapping photos.
Interestingly, although the blizzards of January 1996 and the post-Christmas blizzard of 2010 dumped seven inches less than this 2006 storm, the City seemed more crippled by them. And to me this record snow seemed no deeper than those storms. It could very well be that the accumulation in my Greenwich Village neighborhood, about three miles south of Central Park, was different.
This would be the only snowfall of February. It ended up accounting for two-thirds of the winter's total snowfall.
If you'd like to read about other New York City snowstorms, I've written a post on my weather blog, NYC Weather Archive, that recaps the snowstorms we've experienced since the winter of 1978/79. To go to it please click here.
I was 11 years old at the time and living in Pittsburgh - and greatly annoyed that we got hardly a snowflake from this snowstorm. Meteorology was a new interest of mine and I didn't yet understand the dynamics of weather systems, e.g. East Coast storms often don't affect Western Pennsylvania because the Appalachian Mountains act as a barrier. (As was the case with the post-Christmas blizzard in 2010.) The 15.3" that fell on New York beginning Sunday, February 9, 1969 brought the city to a virtual standstill for a number of days. It was front page news in the Pittsburgh papers, and I eyed the photos enviously. (Like the one to the right showing mostly foot traffic on 2nd Ave. near 45th St.)
It became known as the "Lindsay snowstorm" because New York's mayor John Lindsay (pictured, left) was blamed for not getting streets plowed quickly enough, especially in the boro of Queens. It nearly cost him re-election later that year, but he won running as an independent. (10 years later a series of crippling snowstorms in Chicago was largely responsible for the defeat of its mayor.) At the time it was the City's tenth biggest snowstorm - since then eight subsequent storms have had larger accumulations.
This snowstorm was the inspiration for two episodes of the sitcom That Girl (starring Marlo Thomas). In a two-part storyline Ann and boyfriend Donald were stranded at JFK by the snowstorm after accompanying her parents to the airport. This threatened a Broadway audition Ann had later that day - which she eventually did over the phone. Later, Donald, a writer for the fictional Newsview Magazine, wrote a story about Ann's experience. These episodes aired on ABC on October 30 and November 6, 1969. (They are from the show's fourth season which is available on Amazon.)
