dailynewsnblog
A New York City snowstorm can be wondrous and magical. For jobless men desperate for steady work, it was a lifeline.
On November 30, 1858, when three inches of snow coated the streets, “the snow shovelers began their rounds and work—to them, a great harvest is a snow in the city,” wrote the New-York Tribune.
The Panic of 1857 a year earlier had thrown many New Yorkers off of payrolls, something the Tribune seemed to take note of in their writeup. “This year the number of men was certainly much less, showing some evidence of their being otherwise employed.”
Before the mid-19th century, men looking for work would not have been able to resort to snow shoveling to keep them from the abyss of poverty. In prior eras of Gotham, it was up to householders and business owners to remove it, according to a Bowery Boys post from 2021.
Later, only important streets, like Fifth Avenue and Wall Street, were cleared. The police department was tasked with getting rid of the snow until the Department of Street Cleaning formed in 1881—which transformed into an effective city agency by Commissioner George Waring in 1894.
Under Waring’s command, all city streets, not just major thoroughfares, would be cleared, particularly in the crowded tenement districts on the Lower East Side. To Waring, it was a matter of health to not have “befouled slush” blocking sidewalks in an area so dense with residents.
Waring also called for making sure the carters, who used wagons pulled by horses, actually dumped the snow off the various designated piers along the East River and Hudson River below 14th Street—rather than secretly unload it a few streets away.
The department’s expanded mission came just in time to help New York City residents who lost work in the wake of the Panic of 1893.
After a massive storm blanketed Gotham in late January 1897, the New York Times reported that the snow was “a godsend to the legion of unemployed men, and they made a rush at the old brown building on Centre and Chambers Streets early in the morning, so great was the urgent crush of anxious workers that police had to be called in to hold them in check.”
“As rapidly as possible they were hustled off to the various points referred to, and the demand was even greater than the supply,” continued the Times. “Shovelers could make up to $1.50 a day, while cartmen would range as high as $6 or $7, according to the amount hauled.”
In an era before snow blowers and snow plows attached to enormous trucks, shoveling snow wasn’t exactly a choice job. That was evident outside the Municipal Employment Exchange—a clearing house of city jobs opened in 1914 near the Manhattan Municipal Building on Lafayette Street.
The morning after a blizzard in February of that year, “Father Knickerbocker…offered to put hundreds of applicants right to work shoveling and carting snow,” wrote the Brooklyn Eagle.
“There were a few who balked at going forth into the teeth of the blinding snow storm and shoveling snow all day, but for the most part everybody who applied at the exchange wanted work so badly that the job was accepted immediately.”
“Men of evident refinement, culture, and education whom adversities had numbered among the great army of the unemployed, never hesitated for a moment when informed that the only jobs to be doled out today were on the snow piles throughout the city,” stated the Eagle.
The hiring of seasonal snow shovelers continued into the 21st century, and calls for “emergency snow workers” willing to remove snow and ice from public areas like bus shelters and crosswalks were amplified by the Sanitation Department ahead of Sunday’s snowstorm.
The work is still hard, but at least the pay has increased since 1897: wages range from $19 to $28 per hour.
[Top image: monovisions.com; second image: Bain Collection/LOC; third image: Harper’s Weekly/NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: Bain Collection/LOC; fifth image: Alice Austen/NYPL Digital Collections; sixth image: MCNY, 93.1.1.14276]
