The World's Richest City

Immigrants have always arrived in New York City convinced the streets are paved with gold. I can no longer ask my father's parents--I can no longer even ask him--what they might have thought they were anticipating when they boarded a French ship to immigrate from Greece. Imagine that, you couldn't even get a Greek ship in the early 1900s to sail from a country with perhaps the most miles of sea coast on earth.

I don't really know if there is going to be a correction of some kind in tomorrow's NYT, but I just read in today's paper a story by Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Kate Taylor that the city's comptroller's office estimates it costs the city $1.8 million an inch to remove snow and ice from the city's streets. We obviously need warmer snow and ice. The kind that melts on contact.

The story is on the back page of today's first section, and is themed around the city's play-it-safe strategy that did the job on the late-winter blizzard we just got that really was nowhere near as bad as it was expected to be. That's the good news.

The bad news is reading the estimate that it costs $1.8 million an inch to remove the stuff once it lands. That's an awful lot for sand, salt and labor, even considering it is union labor, to do what I do for free every time it snows so that a member of my family can get to work with their vehicle. I am vastly underpaid.

I can only imagine a future New Yorker cartoon that shows a phalanx of sanitation trucks with dollar signs on their plows as they make their way up Third Avenue, or any street in the city, even an "outer borough" street. I have always wished I could draw a decent picture, especially a cartoon.

The story from a transportation reporter and someone else assigned to the story, tells us that the even better news about the late-blizzard is that since there hasn't been a great deal of snow to remove so far, there was money left in the budget to deal with Tuesday's storm. That is some war chest. Or snow chest.

I feel better already. And better still I don't live in New York City.

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