There’s a cold front in New York City’s immediate future, with the high temperature around 32 degrees, making for a frozen Thanksgiving Day holiday, according to the National Weather Service. Currently, the city experiences 45 degrees, with zero precipitation, humidity at 73% and winds of 2 mph.
Starting last Friday, the New York region was paralyzed by an early winter storm, which Mayor de Blasio said had packed the biggest one-day November snowfall in 136 years. 6.4 inches of snow were recorded
at Central Park.
Had the city known how bad it was going to be, the mayor said, he would have encouraged New Yorkers and commuters to stay home. Instead, more than 1,100 scheduled buses were canceled at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, with thousands of commuters stranded outside in a line that stretched over a full city block.
The snow piled up on streets and highways, which were not plowed, causing a backup of local buses which could not reach their two million daily passengers.
The upper level of the George Washington Bridge was unofficially re-inaugurated as a parking lot following a 20-car crash on the icy pavement. Motorists abandoned their cars and walked away. In New Jersey, schoolchildren were forced to sleep in gyms, waiting for their parents to brave the weather the next morning to come pick them up.
This week, the cold is coming back, or, as National Weather Service meteorologist Peter Wichrowski put it: “It looks like the cold front tracking across the Great Lakes will move across the area late Wednesday or Wednesday night which will bring temperatures barely reaching freezing.”
It will be sunny on Wednesday and Thursday, but the freezing kind of north-eastern sunny, and folks still choosing to watch the Macy’s Day Parade on the streets rather than in their living rooms, better bundle up.