New York Times (blog) Plenty of Snow, and Hard to Get Anywhere

New York City

Updated | 1:50 p.m. The city was covered in snow, but events and services were not interrupted. Long Island reported severe transportation delays; New Jersey shoppers willing to drive found all-but-empty malls.

On its way out the door, autumn gave the New York region a mighty foretaste of winter, dropping more than two feet of snow on parts of Long Island, jamming highways and causing the cancellation of hundreds of flights but offering youngsters a chance to try out their sleds even before Christmas.

By midmorning Sunday, a 100-mile band of falling snow that had buried the stately boulevards of the nation’s capital in 16 inches of powder had already passed through New York City and was centered off Cape Cod. Matt Scalora, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Brookhaven, said the 25 inches of snow recorded there was the deepest since the 1940s, and snow was still falling in the Hamptons.

With gusts reaching 35 miles an hour, sections of the Long Island Expressway had to be closed to permit plowing or because drivers were hampered by wind driving snow into their windshields. Accidents caused by skids dappled highways and side roads.

In New York City, where 10.9 inches of snow fell, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reported that there were no deaths or serious injuries as a result of the storm — a contrast to the five deaths along the East Coast that have so far been blamed on the storm. He also gave drivers a pre-Christmas present: alternate side of the street parking will be canceled Monday. Public schools, however, will remain open, he said.

By Sunday morning, 800 flights — a majority — had been canceled at the three major airports in and around New York City, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The runways and taxiways were clear and the relatively few flights took off with minimal delays, he said, but the rough weather along the East Coast had nevertheless played havoc with airline schedules. Most travelers, he said, had checked with their airlines and not gone out to the terminals, so there was little of the exasperated encounters at the gates and few of the sleeping passengers stretched out on floors sometimes seen with flights disruptions.

Many of the long-haul buses leaving the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown were also canceled, he said.

A Con Edison spokesman said that 40 customers lost power in the New York City and Westchester region. Metro-North canceled shoppers’ specials on its New Haven line, but most other trains into the city were operating on normal Sunday timetables — about once an hour.

The storm hit the Long Island Rail Road hardest. Stanley Davis, a railroad spokesman, said at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday that service was “extremely limited” with delays of 15 minutes to two hours across the system. Service between Ronkonkoma and Greenport to the east was canceled entirely because of high snow drifts, he said. Service on the Montauk branch east of Speonk was very sparse, he said.

“It’s been a challenging storm,” he said.

Once the snow had stopped falling in New Jersey, resourceful shoppers dug their cars out of thick blankets of snow and took advantage of malls that were less teeming than usual.

Susan Bongiorno, a homemaker who lives in Bloomfield, came out early to the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne N.J., to buy her 17-year-old daughter the “Rock Band 2″ video game because, she figured, “Everybody else will still be digging their cars out of the snow.”

“You have so many service people wanting to help you,” she said. “Normally you can’t find one because the stores are so mobbed. At Best Buy this morning I had three guys helping me at once, I just stood there and they did all the running.”

Declan Butler, 33, a college student, and his wife, Anne, 33, a teacher, took their 18-month-old daughter shopping — navigating slippery roads in spots, but noticing how little traffic there was on the way.

“This road is usually a parking lot this time of year,” Mrs. Butler said.

Fred Beierle, 39, who works in financing and lives in Hoboken, also came to the Willowbrook Mall with his companion, Marina Rosa, 24. They had planned to shop Saturday, but stayed home because of the blizzard and were pleasantly surprised on Sunday.

“We’re lucky we came out in the blizzard,” he said. “Because everyone thinks the roads are bad, so they stay off them, but the roads are fine.”

At the mall in Short Hills, N.J., Roger and Lynn Manshell said they had not planned to go shopping, but after seeing their neighborhood sparkling with snow, they decided to have a day of outdoor activities.

“All the snow did was add a beautiful, winter wonderland to an average Sunday,” said Mr. Manshell, 72, who works as a marketer for advertising products.

Nate Schweber contributed reporting from New Jersey.