The great snowstorm of 2006 featured the greatest snowfall in the city’s history, but all immediate symptoms of the storm showed that it wasn’t likely to compare to the blizzards of 1996, 1947, or worst of all, 1888, when hundreds froze to death and the city’s infrastructure buckled under mountains of snow.

Of all New York City’s battles with the elements, from blackouts to heat surges, lightning storms to raging fires, the blizzard has always held a position apart from the others. A blizzard creeps up quietly and often completely unexpectedly, like the infamous storm of March 11, 1888. In preceding weeks that year, the weather was strangely mild, giving rise to claims that winter had come and gone without its characteristic bite. Sound familiar?

Take one account by a man who was traveling with his partner to New York from Boston on business, A.C. Chadbourne. He left home without any idea of what he would find on entering the city, wearing only a “cutaway coat, patent leather shoes, lightweight top coat and the proverbial high silk hat which all young men wore at that period,” according to a letter archived at City University of New York.

Mr. Chadbourne fared better than an estimated 400 people who lost their lives to the blizzard that year. After struggling for several hours with snow up to his chest – drifts reached nearly 50 inches in some parts of the city – he was able to find his way to a hotel with a wood fire and food.

People stranded on New York’s elevated trains during the storm were given a grim Hobson’s choice: Pay a 50-cent fee to an opportunistic entrepreneur offering them a ladder or wait out the cold in the train car with nothing but the clothes on their back. Electrical wires swung dangerously in the streets, ferries sunk in the Hudson, and all movement in New England froze to a stop.

The blizzard of 1947 not only came as a surprise, but had the fastest-falling snow in New York’s recorded history. Over 24 hours, about 26.4 inches of snow piled up in Central Park. Photographs from the time show a ghostlike city: empty streets, trams caked with snow, and the air so thick with flurries that buildings disappeared into the sky.

The storm of 1996 was not distinguished by its snowfall – at 20.6 inches, still no meager amount – but by the stamina of its onslaught. Not one but three storms attacked the Northeast with fierce winds and frigid temperatures over a period of a week and a half.