Snow causes problems for residents and local businesses
Storms bring out best and worst in residents
An Elmore Street residents digs out a car Tuesday morning, as the sun struggles against single-digit temperatures.
Barely a week after Boston residents dug their way out of two feet of snow delivered by a punishing nor’easter, a second storm delivered another ten inches, a one-two punch that yielded the highest snowfall in a one-week span in the city’s recorded history.
Roxbury residents say their neighbors exhibited the best of human nature, helping each other with the often herculean task of excavating cars, sidewalks and walkways.
“I saw community,” said City Councilor Tito Jackson, who helped several of his Grove Hall neighbors dig out. “I saw people shoveling out spaces for their elders and shoveling out fire hydrants.”
While the main avenues were cleared within hours after both storms ended, many Roxbury side streets remained covered in inches of packed snow while Department of Public Works trucks and private contractors worked to clear them.
“We still have a lot of work to do on the side streets,” Jackson said.
Jackson praised the city workers for their efforts, and brought pizza and soda to Yard 10, the DPW station next to Marcella Park.
Not all of the community pulled together in the storm.
Many Roxbury residents, lacking space to throw their shovelfuls of snow, chose their neighbors’ sidewalks and yards, leading to several shouting matches overheard by a Banner reporter.
Retiree Edna Jones-Stroud, a Crawford Street resident, resorted to shoveling rather than shouting after her neighbors added to the burden of clearing a 60-foot stretch of sidewalk.
“My neighbors cleared their cars and shoveled it onto my sidewalk,” she said. “Can you imagine me, 79 years old, shoveling all this?”
And with the cleared parking spots, out came the orange cones, lawn chairs and other space savers to stake a claim on parking spots earned with an hour-and-a-half of hard labor. And when interlopers took spots that others had shoveled, sparks flew. One Elm Hill Avenue resident posted on social media a video of a neighbor shoveling snow on a car that had taken his space.
A pedestrian makes his way to Dudley Station, fighting wind gusts in excess of 20 mph.
The snowfall came at a cost, not just to shovelers’ backs and tempers, but also to businesses, which suffered through a state-wide ban on auto traffic Tuesday of last week and, in Boston, four days of school closures resulting from the storms.
Monica Cannon of Roxbury works full time and has two sons in high school and a daughter in middle school.
“It’s been horrible,” she said. “The sidewalks haven’t been cleared properly, and my street hadn’t been plowed when I left for work this morning,” she said Tuesday. “If you’re a single working parent like me, it’s tough. They close the schools but they don’t always close your job.”
On the recent no-school days, she said, she loaded up on popcorn and movies and had her kids’ friends come over, enlisting another parent to check on them periodically while she was at work.
While the streets open up and students head back to school, Boston residents are bracing for still more snow — 1-3 inches on Thursday and yet another Monday storm that could bring 3-8 inches, according to a forecast on the Weather Underground website.
