The Morning Sky Hinted at Misery, and Then, It Delivered

Weather September 28, 2012, 2:25 pm

By JAMES BARRON

It was a day that defined gloom. There was the color scheme: An ominous palette of grays and blacks when your too-early alarm clock had you hoping for a primary-color sunrise.

There was the view: Low-riding clouds blurred the construction cranes that have been lifting the Midtown skyline higher and higher.

It was, as Josh Goldfein, a Legal Aid lawyer, described it on his Facebook page, an unpleasant-looking start to a “grade-A grey day.”

After that, the deluge. It got your attention with the splatter sound against the windows. People huddled under awnings in front of apartment buildings and in the lobbies of hotels, watchin g the rain pound the streets, the sidewalks, the flowers in the planters by the curb, the alternate-side parkers trapped in their driver's seats long after the clock on the dashboard said it was safe to get out and walk away.

The storm swept uptown like a curtain that descended fast - a menacingly gray curtain, of course, though as it moved along it lightened until, from a high-up apartment building window, it was as white as what you see out the window when your airplane is circling in fog and the pilot is on the intercom, apologizing.

On the ground, it was wet - very wet. The National Weather Service reported Central Park was inundated with 1.71 inches between 8 and 11 a.m. That was slightly more than twice the 0.83 inch the Weather Service recorded at La Guardia Airport and not quite eight times the 0.22 inch it measured at Kennedy International Airport. The Weather Service said isolated showers and thunderstorms would continue through the day.

So for a while - in Manhattan, anyway - there was a wet scramble to stay on schedule. Those who rushed off as they do every morning felt drowned, but were only drenched. “All my scores, my bag and my clothes,” said Jingyi Zhang after her 10-minute walk to the Juilliard School, where she is a piano student.

It was, she said, just a coincidence that the piece she had practiced for a lesson was Beethoven's “Tempest” sonata. “It's describing the storms,” she said. “It's perfect for this.”

There were those who saw the storm closing in, and waited it out. “I took it as a sign to work from home,” said Sara Romanoski, the managing director of the East Village Community Coalition. “I looked out and said, no way, I can do stuff from my computer at home.”