“Their Trucks Buried My Car. Then They Ticketed My Sidewalk. Three Weeks Later I Chipped the Car Out With the Ice Pick From My Freezer Drawer.”
— Ray, 67, Middle Village, Queens, on the winter of 2026
By Dominic P., Middle Village, Queens | September 2026
Ray wasn't the only one. Bay Ridge, Crown Heights, Staten Island — four New Yorkers over 60, same February, all blaming the wrong thing. Here's what they figured out before next winter.
I'm 68. I've done the same 22 feet of sidewalk in Middle Village since 1994. After last winter I asked four people I know — on my block and the blocks I've got family on — what happened to them and what they did about it. This is that.
First, the winter, because the numbers are the point.
43 inches in Central Park. Coldest and snowiest this city had in eleven years. January 25th: eleven inches in the park, fifteen in Washington Heights, fourteen on Staten Island. Then it went below freezing on the 24th and didn't come back up for over a week. Alternate side was suspended for almost a month. By Valentine's Day there were cars all over the five boroughs that hadn't moved since the storm, iced in behind the wall the plow left.
Then February 22nd: the first blizzard warning for the city in ten years. Nineteen and a half inches in Central Park. Twenty-two at LaGuardia. Twenty-four on Staten Island. Travel ban. Plows stuck in Westerleigh. A contractor cleared his own block with a Bobcat because, in his words, the city wasn't coming any time soon. Eighteen thousand snow complaints to 311 in five days.
And the part nobody outside the city gets: the ticket. Snow stops overnight, you've got until 11 a.m. Four feet wide. $100 the first time, up to $350 after. After the January storm alone the city wrote over four thousand of them. Queens got the most.
The Wednesday after the blizzard, the paper said five men on Long Island had died shoveling it. Most of them over 60.
If you own a sidewalk in this city and you're over 60, you lived some version of what follows. Four people. Four blocks. Same mistake.
Ray, 67, Middle Village: "Your trucks buried my car."
Ray's two doors down from me. Thirty-one years driving a bus for this city. He did his walk on January 26th and made it at 12:30 instead of 11, because he'd done the widow's walk first and his back went halfway through his own. $100.
Then his car sat behind the plow wall for three weeks. When alternate side came back on the 19th he chipped it out with the ice pick from his freezer drawer, on his knees.
February 23rd, the morning after the blizzard, a kid in a green city vest did Ray's sidewalk while Ray watched from the window. The inspector came at 11:20 anyway, because the path wasn't four feet wide at the tree pit. Ray went out on the stoop and said, "Your trucks buried my car."
The inspector said, "I don't write the plow routes, sir." And wrote it. $150.
Ray keeps both tickets on the fridge. "$250 the city charged me for a sidewalk their own trucks put a wall in front of."
Frank, 74, Bay Ridge: "I got a guy."
Frank's my brother-in-law's neighbor on Ovington Avenue. Retired Con Ed. Widower. His daughter Denise lives in Hoboken, two hours door to door, and every storm for two winters she called and asked if somebody was doing the walk.
"I got a guy," Frank said.
The guy was Frank. The actual kid on the block had taken a job with the city — they were paying emergency shovelers $30 an hour that week, $45 after forty hours, and fourteen hundred people signed up in a day.
Monday morning of the blizzard, 7:40, Denise's phone rang and it wasn't Frank. It was the neighbor. "Your father's out on the plow wall with the little shovel. I'm just letting you know."
Frank came in at 11:15 and called his daughter and said, "See? Fine." He didn't come to the phone for two days after that.
Denise found the $100 ticket on his fridge in February. "I paid it," she told me. "Then I found out what the ticket was actually for. It wasn't the sidewalk. It was the two days on the couch he never mentioned."
Gloria, 72, Crown Heights: "I picked the ticket."
Gloria's my wife's cousin. Four-story brownstone since 1988, husband gone since 2019, two tenants upstairs, and a sidewalk that in this city isn't a sidewalk. It's a liability with a deadline.
January 25th she did it herself. Four hours, in fifteen-minute pieces, sitting on the bottom step of the stairs in her coat between them. Made the eleven o'clock. Three days on the couch.
Then she put her name on the councilmember's volunteer list, and a 26-year-old came and did her walk in twenty minutes and wouldn't take a dollar, and she thanked him and closed the door and cried. "I'd become the neighbor people shovel for."
The morning after the blizzard the volunteers were spoken for. Gloria stood in the vestibule with her husband's shovel and did the arithmetic out loud. A hundred dollars, or three days on the couch.
"I picked the ticket." She went upstairs and watched her tenant, a nurse coming off a night shift, climb the snowed-in stoop holding the railing with both hands. "That's the lawsuit," she said. "That's what I was watching."
Sal, 63, Westerleigh: eleven pulls.
Sal's my cousin. Semi-attached on Staten Island, 22-foot driveway, and for eleven years a $900 two-stage gas snowblower in the garage, because a man on Staten Island with a driveway buys a snowblower. That's the rule.
January 25th the blower started on the sixth pull, clogged twice in the wet snow, and bounced off the plow wall at the apron like it was a curb. Sal did the apron, the steps, and the walk with a shovel. Couch Monday and Tuesday.
The blizzard put close to thirty inches on his block. And here's the thing about a two-stage nobody tells you: you can't get it out of the garage through thirty inches. Too heavy to lift, too wide to push. Tuesday morning Sal pulled the cord eleven times in the garage anyway, for no reason, then sat down on the step with the door open.
His wife came out reading her phone. "Nobody can move, Sal. Not even the fire truck." Streets in Westerleigh had gone more than 24 hours unplowed. Wednesday, a contractor from the next block cleared the street with his own Bobcat. Sal watched a 40-year-old do it from his garage step with his $900 machine behind him.
What all four of them got wrong. I did too.
Ray blamed the city. Frank blamed his age. Gloria blamed herself. Sal blamed the machine. I blamed my back.
The retired super from the six-story on my corner is 74, and the afternoon after the blizzard he did his building's whole frontage — eighty feet — standing straight up, walking, in fifteen minutes. Ray went across the street in his slippers and asked him what the hell that was. The super said something Ray's repeated to all of us since.
"It was never the snow. It's the lift. Twenty pounds of wet snow on the end of a blade, three feet from your spine. Bend, lift, twist, throw. Two hundred times, in the cold. The city says four feet wide by eleven. It doesn't say lift."
Count it yourself. 22 feet of sidewalk, four feet wide, the stoop, the tree pit. In the watery stuff we got in February, a shovelful is 15 to 20 pounds. That's about two hundred lifts to clear it once. Your back muscles anchor a couple inches from your spine and the snow's three feet away. That's a see-saw rigged against you, two hundred times. That's the couch. Not the years.
Then the second half, which is the NYC half:
"And you can't leave it. Fresh snow moves. Two days old with a truck on it, it's concrete. That's the wall on your car. That's the ice pick. Keep the tool by the door, go out at the first inch, and you never let it get to a wall."
The bent-handle shovel doesn't take the lift out. It moves it to your shoulders. The kid takes the lift out until he gets a city job. Sal's two-stage moved the lift to the part where you wrestle two hundred pounds around a Camry, and couldn't touch the steps. None of us had a tool that took the lift out and lived by the door. So all of us lifted, and all of us waited, and the wall got built.
What they all ended up with
The super's shovel-with-a-motor is called Glacio. Cordless, 20 volts, an auger in the head. The battery clicks into the handle, you pull the trigger, you walk, and it throws the snow up and out in front of you into the tree pit. The only thing that changes is who does the lifting. Nobody.
Ray ordered it that night. Then he told the rest of us. The thing every one of us almost tripped on was the same: the kid down Ray's block had one of those electric shovels from the hardware store, one battery, died in ten minutes, in his garage now. The super's answer was the batteries. This one comes with two. First one quits, click the second in, finish. That's the difference between the one that works and the one in the garage.
It stands by the door on a boot tray. No garage required, which matters, because Ray and Gloria and I don't have one.
The clipper came through that Wednesday night, a couple of inches on top of everything. Thursday morning:
Ray, 22 feet, the stoop, the tree pit: fourteen minutes. Standing up. His wife was in the window this time.
Frank, Bay Ridge: twelve minutes. Denise had it shipped to his house and told him it was hers. The neighbor texted her a photo at 7:05 — Frank upright on his own walk with his coat over his pajamas. "He timed it. He's insufferable."
Gloria, Crown Heights: eleven minutes, in her robe and boots, the stoop steps top to bottom. Her tenant came home from the night shift, looked at the walk, looked at Gloria in the window, and nodded once.
Sal, Westerleigh: the steps, the walk, and the driveway, sixteen minutes. The two-stage is still under the tarp. It's on Marketplace for $400. A guy from Tottenville with a hundred-foot driveway is coming for it, and it's the right machine for him.
The plow wall took every one of them two afternoons, and I'm going to be straight with you the way the super was. The top half is snow and it comes off in layers, top down, walking. The bottom foot is ice the trucks packed for three weeks, and no powered shovel on earth eats that. You chip it with a steel shovel standing up, ten minutes, and clear the chips with this. It's a shovel that does the lifting for you. It is not a plow. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't stood on a Queens curb in February.
Ray did the widow's walk in March. Gloria did the empty lot next door. Frank did Mrs. Ferrante's and didn't tell his daughter. Sal did the house across the street in four minutes. Nobody asked any of them.
Ray's wife said it best, standing in her kitchen with the calendar:
"You didn't lie down once this whole thing."
"I didn't lift anything," Ray said.
That's all that was missing. Not a younger back. Not a bigger machine. Not a kid, not a guy, not a list, not the city. Just taking the lift out of a job every one of us was going to do anyway.
You already know which side of this you're on
You keep doing what you've been doing. The shovel at seven. Make it by 12:30. Eat the ticket some years, the couch the others. Leave the car until alternate side comes back and chip it out with a pick. Tell your daughter you've got a guy. Pull the cord eleven times. Watch the kid in the green vest from the window.
Or you take the lift out. Do the walk, the stoop, and the top of the wall standing up, in the time it takes the coffee to brew, at the first inch instead of the sixth. With a tool that stands by the door because you don't have a garage either.
And see what the inspector finds at 11:20 when he walks past your house.
If it doesn't earn its keep on your block, send it back. Thirty days. Full refund. The risk is on them, not you.
