Photos: Snow Rats, Sledding & More Scenes From Today's Snowstorm

All things considered, the first winter storm of the pandemic era was as ideal a snowstorm as New York City could have gotten.

The storm really got underway on Wednesday evening just as schools were closing and many jobs were ending for the day. While it caused a brief pause in outdoor dining for most, there were still some who weren't deterred by the weather. The snow mostly accumulated overnight, so people got to wake up to a fresh white coating mostly untarnished by cars and humans.

There was enough snow on the ground to provide children with plenty of opportunities to go sledding today—snow day scrooges be damned—but not enough that it was too treacherous for people trying to traverse the sidewalks. Ultimately, NYC got about 10 inches of accumulation, with that number climbing up to around a foot in some of the areas just outside the city. We avoided the mass flooding that places like Freeport got; we also avoided a 40 inch monster like Binghamton received.

Ultimately, as much as we were excited for a storm as big as the blizzard of 2010, it was probably for the best that we eased into this winter with a relatively mild snowstorm. With COVID cases surging and guidelines changing by the week, sanitation services facing cuts this year... this could have been a total disaster.

But it was the opposite of a disaster—it was indeed as unexpectedly majestic as the snow rat below, which Kylie Mitchell, a local sculptor with an affinity for rats, says took about 4 hours to build in Greenpoint’s McGolrick Park this afternoon.