By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Hazel Whye built her first snowman.
It had been 12 years since she’d emigrated from Trinidad, and Whye had never really embraced New York snowstorms. But Wednesday was different.
Inspired by the enthusiasm of her 6-year-old son Miles, she trudged with him to Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem to play in the blizzard.
“I didn’t grow up with this, and I miss home on days like today,” she said. But, she added, “Now I think it’s fun.”
As the storm draped the city in white on Wednesday, residents of Upper Manhattan responded with purpose and joy. They layered on clothes, dug out, faced the cold, and many, no matter what age, acted like children.
“Mommy, nooooo!” Alyssa Baker, 8, squealed as an armload of snow thudded on her back. Her mother, Marya Baker, laughed and took off running through Bennett Park in Washington Heights. She turned to see her Alyssa coming at her with a snowball of her own, and screamed like a girl.
In Fort Tryon Park, which connects Washington Heights and Inwood, a popular sledding hill was packed with shouting children and camera-snapping parents. Nearby, a hiker stopped along the park’s Heather Garden to admire snow blanketing a canopy of trees.
“You’ve got to take time to enjoy it,” said the hiker, moving on without giving his name.
On the streets were the familiar sounds of a New York snowstorm: the scrape of shovels on sidewalks, the crunch of powder underfoot, the rattle of chains on buses, the pulse of snowplows’ back-up alarms.
But not everyone had that luxury to stop and listen.
In East Harlem, Sandra Joseph finished her shift at a Lexington Avenue liquor store and used a windshield scraper to unload several inches of snow from the top of her Toyota Camry. She’d done the same thing that morning, before setting off for work from her home in Corona, Queens. Her face bore the determined expression of New Yorkers who park their cars on the street.
“You just got to take your time and get it done,” Joseph said. “I’ll be doing this again tomorrow morning.”
Horace Flowers, a lawyer, showed up at his midtown office Wednesday morning and found the place empty. So he returned to his Lenox Avenue townhouse and grabbed a shovel. He may have been the only man in Harlem shoveling the sidewalk in a suit and tie.
“I went to school in Buffalo, so to this is lightweight stuff,” he said, picking through a layer of icy snow.
Back in Marcus Garvey Park, Asari Beale snapped photos of her 7-year-old son throwing snowballs at friends. She’d been sent home from her job at a local early-literacy program, and immediately packed on the layers and headed outside.
“The snow’s more fun when you don’t have to work,” Beale said. “It’s even better when you have kids.”
