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One day before the ball was to drop in New York City's Times Square, the most severe snowstorm since the Blizzard of '96 covered the city with more than a foot of snow and heavy gales, shutting down all three major airports and causing scores of travel headaches.
Central Park had 12 inches and falling Saturday afternoon, already a record for the date. The previous record, of only 2.9 inches, had been on the books since 1939.
Washington and Baltimore were totally spared, but Philadelphia Mayor John Street declared a snow emergency — though the City of Brotherly Love got less of the white stuff than predicted.
The storm pounded New Jersey, Connecticut and other regions relentlessly as it made its way up through New England and into Canada.
Meanwhile, Americans across the South and Midwest continued digging themselves out of snowdrifts after a week's worth of icy storms of their own, and many were still without power.
LaGuardia Airport in the Queens borough of New York City and Newark Airport, just across the Hudson in New Jersey, had already closed by late morning, with New York's Kennedy Airport scraping by using just one runway through the midday hours. But by early afternoon, a foot of snow had combined with strong winds to severely limit visibility, so JFK shut down too, effectively preventing thousands from entering or leaving the region for the New Year's weekend.
The trio of heavily trafficked airports had no definite plans for when to reopen. Others along the East Coast and elsewhere — including Philadelphia International — experienced thousands of delayed and canceled flights.
Amtrak also canceled its Metroliner service between New York and Washington, but continued to run its Northeast Direct Service between Washington and Boston.
Snow extended from southern New Jersey to Maine, coating the region in sparkling white. Some towns in New Jersey were reporting an accumulation of as much as 20 inches. Precipitation was expected to taper off by nighttime and stop completely before daybreak Sunday.
The winter storm arrived in all its fury just in time to see Y2K come to an end, throwing many New Year's weekend plans off course.
Revelers who count on the annual Dick Clark celebration to welcome the New Year will still see the ball drop in Times Square, city officials said.
A buoyant Rudolph Giuliani, major of New York, rejected the notion that the storm could force the famed New Year's Eve party to be canceled Sunday night.
"Although it's cold, it's not unbearable," he said of the weather, insisting the city could handle anything. Asked if the snow would interfere with the New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square, he responded: "Ha, ha!"
And the show did go on along Broadway for the bravest of theatergoers while the Great White Way lived up to its name — becoming much whiter than usual. The matinees were playing as scheduled — for those who could get to them.
Those trying to navigate around Manhattan were doing so with increasing difficulty as the day wore on, with hundreds of flights grounded and motorists slowed to a creep. Major highways like the New Jersey Turnpike were enforcing speed limits of only 35 mph. More than 100 city buses were stuck on snow-clogged streets, and a car pileup closed down a parkway in Queens.
"It's too dangerous — people's lives are at stake," bus driver James McCain said after a harrowing trip into New York City from Montclair, N.J. He got caught behind another skidding bus on the ramp into the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan and his 11 passengers got out and hoofed it.
A record snowfall clogged the city's streets Saturday, bringing out fleets of city plows and salt spreaders, causing headaches for travelers and producing smiles on faces of people lucky enough to have the chance to enjoy it.
The Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center had an unusual frosting of white. Children sledded down the steps of a building on Wall Street. A cross-country skier glided by on a car-free road in Central Park.
If there was a day more beautiful in the "city that never sleeps," New Yorkers could not remember it.
"It's breathtaking!" said Mailis Widlanski. She beamed as she walked her great Danes, Bugs and Bunny, past Central Park's Tavern on the Green restaurant, its lanterns glowing faintly through the thick haze of falling flakes.
"It makes Christmas and New Year's feel a little more special," Bob Catene said as he shoveled the walk in front of his Italian food store in Brooklyn.
That wonder was shared by others in the hardest-hit regions.
"You don't hear a sound in the world," said Jeffrey Greene, 56, of Merion, Pa., on his way to synagogue Saturday morning. "There's nothing quite like a walk in the morning with a new snow. The world seems so pure, so beautiful."
Stamford, Conn., resident Kristin Foschi, who had hoped to fly out of LaGuardia to celebrate her great-grandmother's 100th birthday in Ohio, planned to drive the family back to Connecticut instead.
Still, she described the wintry landscape as "spectacular."
"You can't see any of the runways, it's completely white," she said from a terminal at LaGuardia, as she watched her 4-year-old triplets and two other children. "By the time a plow completes a circle, it's covered again. It's really quite entertaining."
Others weren't so amused.
Newlyweds Tim and Tracy Scanlon of Morris Plains, N.J., were stuck at Newark International because the snow grounded their flight to the Cayman Islands for their 10-day honeymoon.
"All the airport hotels are sold out. And I can't even get a limo here to pick me up," a frustrated Tim Scanlon said.
Continental Airlines alone canceled 225 Saturday flights in and out of its Newark airport hub.
Philadelphia's airports stayed open but airlines reported delays and cancellations. Aside from its canceled Metroliner service between New York and Washington, Amtrak kept most of its other trains running. New Jersey's NJ Transit suspended bus service in several counties. All bus suervice in and out of the Manhattan Port Authority was also stopped, said spokesman Steve Coleman.
More than 100 city buses got stuck on snow-clogged roads, and a car pileup shut down the Jackie Robinson Parkway near Cypress Hills in Queens.
The Big Apple put 1,600 plows to work with 350 salt spreaders dipping into the stockpile of 200,000 tons of salt stash. Some 2,500 sanitation employees toiled in 12-hour shifts.
The Nor'easter was forecast to dump more than a foot of snow in some areas before it blew across the U.S./Canadian border and pushed out to sea. High winds created severe blizzard conditions, sharply cutting off visibility and making any sort of travel difficult and dangerous.
The storm reached New York in the pre-dawn hours, and forecasters predicted it would hit the Boston area Saturday evening. At the same time, another system in the Midwest was working its way east over the Appalachians. The two were expected to collide, producing extreme snowy, icy and blustery weather.
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Portions of the central East Coast escaped the brunt of the storm because it developed farther north and east than originally forecast.
The coasts of Maryland, Delaware, and northern Virginia had been expected to get at least 6 inches, but by 10 a.m., the sky was clear in Washington.
Residents had plenty of warning that the blizzard would form and gain momentum because of the merging of one weather system that had plastered the upper Midwest and another that slid across the South.
Even before the first flake fell, people along the East Coast scrambled for groceries, boots, shovels, snowblowers and salt as weathermen warned of power blackouts and days trapped indoors.
Road-maintenance crews around the region plowed and salted the streets again and again, trying to keep ahead of the falling snow. Others in regions the storm bypassed stood by, ready in case Mother Nature surprised them.
Saturday's blizzard is expected to be the worst since January 7, 1996. That storm dumped more than 20 inches of snow across parts of the East, including New York and Pennsylvania.
Elsewhere, people across the Plains continued to deal with the aftermath of storms that hit earlier in the week, killing at least 40 people. Thousands remained without power in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
— The Associated Press contributed to this report
-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), December 30, 2000