THE HOUDINI FILE: THE BLIZZARD OF '88

Street scene, New York City, Winter 1888

Last week we trembled both from the cold and the dire predictions of the worst blizzard in New York history.

"It's going to be worse than the famous ‘Blizzard of 1888,’" the weather pundits promised, and fear ruled our small island off the east coast, named Manhattan. Luckily, the pundits were wrong.

The NY Sun's roundup of blizzard reportage, March 1888: "Blizzard Was King."

Houdiniphiles all know that the winter of 1888 was the moment Harry’s family joined him and his father in Manhattan. They arrived right in the middle of the worst snowstorm in history: drifts piled 30 feet high; trolley conductors had to sleep in their streetcars stranded on the snowbound tracks. If you ventured out you were in danger of being crushed by falling telegraph poles.

High winds shear off telegraph poles on St.Mark's Place.

The blizzard began shortly before the family was due to arrive.

One bitterly cold day Harry came back to their rooms on East 79th Street to find his father pacing and rocking back and forth before the cold fireplace, chanting: ”The Lord will provide! The Lord will provide!”

“What are you doing?” Harry asked.

“Shukkeling,” his father replied in Yiddish. “In the Torah it says ‘you shall worship God in your bones!’ And it keeps you warm!”

Harry got a pained look on his face, though he did not let his father see it. “You believe in God, but I’m putting my faith in coal.”

-- from The Secret Notebooks of Harry Houdini, forthcoming

Braving the cold, Harry went back outside and got a job as a messenger, based on his experience in Milwaukee. The money he made bought coal and saved the lives of his family, who would certainly have frozen or starved to death otherwise.