When nearly 20 inches of snow buried parts of Brooklyn earlier this week, Muhammad Ali Hamaz found himself stranded at home in Coney Island, missing multiple days of work as unplowed local streets made travel nearly impossible.
Ali Hamaz, an Uber driver, said the storm’s aftermath left him frustrated, arguing the city could have done more to clear local roads in the outer edges of the borough.
“They definitely could have done a better job,” Ali Hamaz said. “Most of the main roads were clear, but the local, the inside streets, the conditions were bad. I saw a lot of cars were stuck.”
With warmer, wetter weather expected to melt the snow faster than January’s storm, Brooklynites were divided over how the city handled February’s blast. Some welcomed the quieter streets and praised Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s communication about cleanup efforts. Gig workers mourned about lost wages, while others expressed dismay over soaring energy bills and concerns for residents who lost power.
Car owners were by far the biggest critic of the city’s effort to clear the snow.
Jackson Minckler, a Floridian who now lives in Greenpoint, feels that after heavy snowfall, parking in his neighborhood gets increasingly difficult.
“I shoveled it out after the first day since the storm and it’s been fine, but I haven’t moved it, because there are no parking spots in my neighborhood and I don’t want to lose my parking spot,” he said.
Unlike Ali Hamaz, Minckler believes that the city did a much better job cleaning up the aftermath when compared to the first deluge.
“I think they were much more prepared this time than the snow storm in January,” he said.
He also liked the mayor’s push to hire more emergency snow shovelers: “I saw ads that they would pay people to shovel, so I thought that was cool to generate income for city residents,” he said.
Katherine Simwood, a resident of Prospect Park South, said she was happy to see the city shut down for the day.
“But I say this as I have power and I work remotely anyway,” said Simwood as she walked her dog in the snow on Monday.
Simwood said she thinks the crosswalks in many Brooklyn neighborhoods remain treacherous after any snowstorm, as the small paths that are dug out by local businesses or residents quickly turn into a deep pool of black slush and water.
“If you don’t have good boots, you’re screwed,” she said.
Neha K., who works as a bartender and a part-time actor, said that the latest snowfall is “much prettier than the last one.”
But the Bushwick resident admitted she is over it. “I’ve been staying inside too much. My shifts have been canceled and no auditions have been coming.”
While her power has stayed on, the service charges from Con Edison in the past month have topped $100 each for herself and her roommates.
“I can’t imagine how that would impact someone with a family or with kids,” she said. “I just have a dog, so I have to leave the heat on in my room longer and I just bought more things for the house because I feel bad. The bills are crazy.”
She also appreciated the many comedic takes by Brooklynites online.
“There’s more community coming together,” she said. “I go on Instagram and I watch people having snowball fights. It’s kind of fun, everyone’s outside building snowmen.”
Taylor Diamond, a photographer from Bushwick, thought the city cleared the streets much faster than the January snow storm.
“Honestly it wasn’t so bad compared to the time before because the temperatures weren’t so bad,” Diamond said. “I feel like the cold that came with that first snow storm had really made everything linger.”
Diamond was relieved he wasn’t one of the thousands of people who lost, or continue to lose, power. That said, he noticed it took a long time for his landlord to shovel the steps to his apartment building.
“I had to do it eventually, because I was tired of waiting for them to send somebody,” he added.
He appreciated how the mayor communicated about where warming centers were located and how to shovel.
Neha K. agreed, and liked how Mamdani was more of an Internet mayor versus a TV mayor.
“He’s not just on network TV,” she said. “With de Blasio and even Bloomberg, you would only see their responses on network TV and a lot of us don’t have that, so it’s really useful that Zohran is going on Instagram and creating videos. We’re getting the whole story because he’s an internet mayor, not just a TV mayor. That’s very helpful.”
Natasha Gousse, who works for the NYC Board of Elections and has lived in Bushwick “damn near all my life,” said the snow didn’t take her by surprise.
“When you’ve been raised in this, it's nothing new,” said Gousse. “It made me think of my childhood, about when I was a kid. We didn’t lose power, Brooklyn did good. They cleaned up really good. Kudos to [Mamdani], as you can see, the streets are cleaned up. It’s been worse.
But she’s definitely over winter.
“They can take this weather and find another place for it,” she said.
