The New York Bureau of Municipal Research studied everything — snowfall was no exception. So it’s no surprise the collection we’re processing includes exhaustive reports of how the city coped with snowstorms in 1914-15. Basically, the big innovation of the Department of Street Cleaning (as Sanitation was then called) was to try to shovel the snow into the sewers as quickly as it fell and flush it down with hoses. Uh, they forgot about high tide when the sewers backed up.

We got a story on our research into The Wall Street Journal of Dec. 30.

The archives in Baruch’s Newman Library are replete with other vintage images: