Suburban moving crews can simply back their trucks into a driveway and start loading. But in New York City, even in the best of times, movers must negotiate narrow side streets lined with parked cars and walk-up buildings with claustrophobic winding staircases.
Across the city, moving companies had to deal with another daunting challenge this weekend: the aftereffects of a snowstorm and yet another day of bitter cold. The icy January weather lingered into the beginning of the new month, the busiest time for movers in a city still dominated by renters.
In frozen conditions, the movers must figure out how to navigate snow-clogged roads, maneuver behemoth vans into iced-over spaces and climb slippery stoops, clinging with numb hands onto expensive furniture and precious knickknacks.
On Sunday, a crew from Cool Hand Movers in Brooklyn showed up for work around dawn, with snow flurries and the temperature hovering around 10 degrees.
The first order of business was picking up shovels and digging their truck out from its snowed-in parking space.
“Just to begin each job, we’re spending, like, 30 minutes shoveling ourselves out,” said one worker, Jhony Albayero.
Another worker, Nick Lenoir, added: “And it’s frozen solid, not just powdery snow.”
New York City has faced more than a week of below-freezing temperatures. A winter storm last weekend left more than a foot of snow in some places.
That snow has been shoveled and plowed into piles and drifts that have iced up and created something of an obstacle course for pedestrians, and for drivers seeking to enter or exit parking spaces. Snow-lined streets and sidewalks remain narrowed.
All of which has made many outdoor jobs more difficult, from trash collection to delivering food by e-bike.
Even on summer days, Mr. Lenoir said, the Cool Hand Movers crew relies on “some help from on high” to secure the most important factor: a parking spot anywhere near the customer’s home.
The parking situation is even grimmer right now, and the snow makes double-parking dicey. On Sunday morning, the crew managed to find a space at its first stop, a house in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn whose owner was moving to an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Snow was encroaching on the spot, so the crew of four had to break out the shovels again just to angle the truck in. To make the truck fit, they backed it into a snowdrift, which blocked the use of the truck’s rear lift.
So the crew used the snowy mound — fortified with a discarded Christmas tree embedded into it — as an improvised loading ramp.
“Sometimes you just have to make do as best you can,” Mr. Lenoir said.
For Cool Hand Movers, the cold snap comes at a difficult time. The company’s warehouse space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, was ruined by a four-alarm fire on Jan. 21, which fire officials said was worsened by the wind.
The blaze destroyed almost all of the company’s equipment and inventory, said its owners, Matt and Ashley Graber, and left them without a designated place to park their trucks. That has meant having to park their fleet on the street and eliminate shifts at the warehouse.
But the workers have stayed positive. Mr. Lenoir said he wore his lucky winter socks adorned with penguin prints on Sunday.
“I dressed for the occasion,” he said. But he added that they would not be likely to remain dry.
“Getting your feet wet is unavoidable, and it stays like that the rest of the day,” he said. “When it’s freezing outside, you try to move as fast as you can, but that’s when you start making mistakes.”
The movers made sure to watch their footing.
“Carrying heavy stuff, that’s the gig; we’re used to that,” Mr. Albayero said. “But with this weather and the risk of slipping and falling, it takes the job to another level.”
“You’ve got to really watch your step,” he added. “No one wants to die.”
Inside the customer’s home in Gowanus, the workers began wrapping furniture and carting items — potted plants, shelves, boxes, a coffee table — to the truck.
At one point, all four movers wobbled under a couch mummified in tape and plastic. With newfound mountaineering skills, they heaved the couch up the snow drift and into the truck.
At another stop, a walk-up apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, next to the Williamsburg Bridge, the crew maneuvered a smaller van down a narrow one-way street and backed it into a small space near a fire hydrant.
With the van jutting out into a street narrowed by snowdrifts, a queue of drivers behind it leaned on their horns.
Another worker, Gerardo Quino, walked out and waved the cars through the tight passageway.
The customer, Weston Lowe, an art adviser, sympathized with the movers. “The job is already so difficult, and to throw in all these new obstacles created by the weather, it just makes it that much harder,” he said.
This being New York, several Cool Hand movers said they worked to support their creative careers.
“We do this to fuel the fire of the dream,” said Mr. Lenoir, a musician.
Another crew member, S. Lumbert, a postmodern dancer who has worked with the Bill T. Jones company, was securing items with straps inside the van.
Mx. Lumbert was taking time off from dancing full-time but said that working as a mover was “actually good cross-training.”
At one point, Mx. Lumbert and Mr. Quino seemed to be executing a pas de deux as both balanced a credenza while nimbly traversing clumps of ice on the sidewalk.
Carrying furniture was not a tough transition, Mx. Lumbert said. Both involve good balance, sure footing and heavy lifting — a dance partner is sometimes upward of 175 pounds.
Although, they added, with the recent weather, “There were a few times last week I was thinking it might be nice to be back in the studio instead.”
Mr. Quino, who also works as a bartender, nodded.
“I treat the job like a workout,” he said. “So the snow just makes it more of a challenge.”
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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