Sure, there were buckets of snow falling from the sky, howling winds and a partial travel ban. But at Kew Gardens Animal Hospital in Queens, there was also a dog who had eaten a rubber ball, another who needed his deworming medication before he could hop a flight to Europe, and a cat recovering from lily poisoning.
And so Zara Ramirez, an office manager at the practice, was at her station on Monday, even if most of her colleagues were not. “I, luckily, live around the block from the office,” she said on the phone with a smile in her voice.
Across the New York area, notwithstanding the blizzard, thousands of workers whose jobs require them to show up in person did just that: nannies and health aides, doormen and doctors, pizza-slingers and bartenders and all manner of emergency responders.
Aaron Duran, a clerk at a Sunoco station in Amityville on Long Island, where 17 inches of snow had already fallen by 8 a.m., answered the phone on Monday with three words: “We are open!”
Mr. Duran, 29, said he had come in after his boss called and said all his co-workers had bailed on their shifts. “I don’t blame them,” he said. “I said, let me do it. It’s better than sitting at home.” Mr. Duran had a stroke of good fortune on his 4 a.m. commute from nearby West Babylon: He found himself behind a plow truck and followed it all the way in.
A few miles away at South Oaks Hospital, Bob Norton, 64, not only made it to work as a security guard, but also gave rides to two nurses whose cars could not traverse the unplowed roads. “You do what you’ve got to do,” he said, though, like Ms. Ramirez and Mr. Duran, he said that some of his colleagues had stayed home. They had “different values,” he said. “I guess I’m old-school.”
Down the road in downtown Copiague, there appeared to be only one shop open: Mi Plaza, a grocery and multiservice store with a sign advertising Central American products. Behind the counter, Carolina Videa, 32, was eating mango and tangerines and thinking about her relatives back in Nicaragua. They were the reason she had braved the snowy roads. “My family,” she said in Spanish. “I need money.”
New York City’s ban on nonessential driving until noon Monday was a boon to Jasmine Hendrickson, a radiology supervisor at Jamaica Hospital in Queens. The trip from her home in Long Island City, at the other end of the borough, took only 25 minutes, partly because there was no one else on the road, and partly because someone had sent her the city’s map of which streets have been plowed when. “That was pretty cool,” she said.
Some workers found that there was a reward just for showing up. “Everyone’s been so pleasant today,” said Sarah Eve, a clerk at a 7-Eleven in Copiague. She had sold out of shovels and de-icer, but was doing a brisk business in another pairing: “Hot food and cold beer,” she said. “It’s like the Super Bowl.”
For some newer New Yorkers, having to leave the house and trek to a job offered a crash course in the reality of living in a city where winter still sometimes happens. Chris Nada, 24, took the bus to work at a deli in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, wearing multicolored lace-up boots that were more stylish than waterproof.
“I didn’t know how I was supposed to dress,” said Mr. Nada, 24, who moved to New York from Houston a year ago. As a steady stream of customers came in to stock up on groceries and toilet paper, Mr. Nada gestured out the window at the snow and declared himself “kind of appalled.”
Then there were those whose work entails confronting the snow directly.
On Sunday night, a manager at a 235-unit apartment complex in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan put out an all-hands-on-deck call for shovelers. Michael Bohannon, 38, who works in maintenance, put on a few layers and made the two-hour trip on the A train from his home in Far Rockaway, Queens. Throughout the night, he would clear off the rapidly accumulating snow for a couple of hours, take a 10-minute nap in the break room and then go back out. “I would set my alarm clock,” he said. “You’ve got to stay fresh.”
Tyrell Cook, 37, was one of the army of emergency shovelers hired by the city’s Sanitation Department. He dug out crosswalks and bus stops in Chelsea in Manhattan from 8 p.m. Sunday to 4 a.m. Monday, went home to Queens to sleep for a few hours and then headed out again. “There must be some people at the bus stop right now, happy there’s no snow in the way,” he said. He was pleased that Mayor Zohran Mamdani raised the wage for shovelers on Monday to $30 an hour, from $19.14.
In New Jersey, the pharmacy in the Ironbound section of Newark that Pedro Torres manages was not even open, but he trekked in anyway, shovel in hand. “I came out because I give a damn about my community,” said Mr. Torres, 53. “I don’t want people slipping and falling. Everything should be nice and clear out front.”
A nearby restaurant, Ferry Street Barbecue, was packed with customers after the snow subsided. Marco Sosa, 45, who lives in Newark and works at the restaurant, knew why.
“Not so many places are open because of the snow,” he said as he hustled to serve another order of chicken, ribs, fries and black beans. “People are always going to be hungry, no matter what.”
Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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