New York City, New York, March 12, 1888.

On Sunday evening, March the 11th, it rained in Manhattan, a warm, steady rain,

the kind that dissolves the last filthy crusts of winter snow and whispers of crocuses.

The temperature sat in the low 50s. The winter of 1887 to 88 had been the mildest in 17 years,

and 2 million New Yorkers had every reason to believe that spring had arrived. By 1 o'clock Monday

morning, the rain turned to snow.

By dawn, the snow turned to something else entirely. The wind built through the small hours

until it was shrieking through the iron lattice of the elevated railroad trestles at 80 miles an hour,

driving snow sideways in white sheets so thick a man could not see Trinity Church from the foot of Broadway.

The temperature dropped 30 degrees in a matter of hours.

What had been puddles at midnight became ice by breakfast.

What had been a mild March rain became the worst storm in the recorded history of the United States.

They would call it the Great White Hurricane.

Before it was finished, it would kill more than 400 people, sink 200 ships, and bury the most

powerful city on the continent under drifts that reached the third floor windows.

But on Monday morning, New Yorkers did what New Yorkers do. They went to work, the elevated railroads,

those sooty, clattering marvels of iron and steam that carried a quarter million passengers a day on tracks 30 feet above the street,

ran into trouble early. Snow packed the switches, ice slicked the rails.

On the 3rd Avenue line, a train running with two engines to fight the grade, rear-ended another,

near the curve at Bleaker and 8th Street, killing an engineer and injuring a car full of passengers

who had no business being there in the first place. By 1 o'clock in the afternoon, every elevated

line in the city ground to a halt. 15,000 passengers sat stranded in unheeded coaches, suspended above

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