After the Blizzard of ’61, Mayor Robert Wagner banned cars in New York for almost a week, sealing off the city with police checkpoints. During the Depression, storms like the Blizzard of ’35 meant government-sponsored snow-removal jobs for thousands of unemployed men. The cleanup of the Blizzard of 1920 included the bizarre sight of soldiers from the chemical warfare service of the United States Army using fuel-spewing flamethrowers to melt snow and ice.

Then, of course, there was the legendary Blizzard of ’88. It is probable that no inhabitants of the area that is now New York, going all the way back to the Lenape Indians, ever had so hellacious an experience of winter as the New Yorkers of March 1888 did. It wasn’t so much the 21 inches of snow, a total surpassed not just last February but also on Dec. 26-27, 1947 (26.4 inches). It was more the winds gusting as high as 85 miles an hour and the single-digit temperatures, and of course the fact that the late-19th-century metropolis simply wasn’t sturdy enough to withstand the onslaught, the likes of which it could never have imagined.

Given modern New York’s far stronger infrastructure, mechanized snow removal and infinitely better communications, it is tempting to believe that no weather event could ever replace that one as the worst in New York history. But one effect of global warming, scientists say, may be more volatile weather, with storms that, if not greater in number, are more intense. So it is probably inadvisable to assume that the worst Mother Nature can inflict on New York has already occurred.

WRITTEN accounts of the Blizzard of ’88, which killed about 100 people in New York and 300 elsewhere, reveal a basic way in which people were different then. When New Yorkers woke up on the morning of Monday, March 12, and beheld what was clearly an awful and even dangerous day to go out — snow rapidly accumulating in big drifts, winds gusting at gale force, temperature in the low 20s and dropping — most of them seem not to have given much thought to staying home.