New Yorkers who are up to a slushy slog to Central Park West and 77th Street may sneer at the current messiness when they encounter an exhibition on the legendary Blizzard of '88 - 1888, that is.

The modest show of 90 items, half of them photographs and half letters, newspapers and other memorabilia of the town's most traumatic snow-in, occupies the gallery at the entrance of the New-York Historical Society's reference library. Visitors to the second floor will learn about the big blow that shut down the Eastern Seaboard 100 years ago.

The blizzard hit town early on Monday, March 10, after a balmy Saturday and drizzly Sunday that had set New York to thinking of the spring that seemed just around the corner. There was no hint of the snow that would pile up to a height - or depth -of almost 21 inches in 3 days, accompanied by winds that gusted to 85 miles an hour and caused drifts that towered to 20 feet. The subzero temperature brought ice from the Hudson into the normally warmer East River, and hundreds of people walked between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

The elevated lines were backed up, and some people paid the men who supplied ladders from the street; other people shivered for two days in the stalled trains. In a New York way, people helped and people profited. It was the worst of times and only in later years did some of those who went through it recall it wistfully as a period in which courage and humanity melted the frigidity imposed by nature. In-House Collection