The storm that buried New York City yesterday in more than two feet of snow, making the streets nearly impossible to drive on, suspending air travel into and out of the area, and turning the parks into fluffy white playgrounds, was the worst in city history.

At 4 p.m. yesterday, the U.S. National Weather Service was reporting 26.9 inches of snow in Central Park, the deepest snow the city has seen since 1869, when officials first start keeping records. Until yesterday, the record was 26.4 inches, set almost 60 years ago, in 1947.

“We’re in the record books,” the city’s sanitation commissioner, John Doherty, said last night after touring the five boroughs.

The city responded to the storm with 350 salt spreaders, 2,200 snowplows, 20 snow melters (which liquefy 60 tons of snow an hour), and about 2,500 sanitation workers. It had 200,000 tons of rock salt on hand to coat more than 6,000 miles of streets and started hiring temporary civilian workers to help dig out.

“Our sanitation workers have been on the streets since before the first flake touched the ground and they have done an incredible job, going round for round with this massive storm,” the mayor said in statement last night after the storm topped the charts.

Earlier in the day, during a press conference in a salt storage facility on the West Side Highway, Mr. Bloomberg cautioned New Yorkers to stay off the roads, calling it a “dangerous storm.”

Mr. Bloomberg and Governor Pataki activated city and state emergency response plans. In Brooklyn, representatives from about 30 city agencies staffed the emergency command center to keep track of the storm and to coordinate response.

The blizzard was the first debilitating snowfall of an otherwise mild winter and harkened back to the “Blizzard of ’96,” which blanketed much of the East Coast and temporarily paralyzed the region.

Last night, Mr. Bloomberg said all primary roads, most secondary roads, and more than half of the city’s tertiary streets had been plowed at least once. He did, however, encourage New Yorkers to use subways, buses, and other forms of mass transit today and implored parents to keep their children out of the street because of poor visibility.

While city government offices and schools will be open today, the city already planned to suspend alternate side parking as well as garbage and recycling pickup because of Lincoln Day. All vacation days for sanitation workers were cancelled as the agency hooked snowplows onto nearly all of the vehicles in their fleet and sent crews out for back-to-back 12-hour shifts.

Mr. Bloomberg, who was dressed in jeans and a vest emblazoned with the sanitation union’s logo, said the city would plow first and worry about the cost later. Mr. Doherty said the annual snow budget for the department is $31 million and that the agency has spent $17 million on the few mild storms in the city this year and so is in “good shape.”

According to the Associated Press, the storm closed all three regional airports at various points yesterday, though John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark International opened by evening. Still, more than 500 flights were canceled and train service was spotty.

Since 1969, when Mayor Lindsay was given the distinction of botching the city’s snow removal operation, most mayors have acted swiftly to deal with snow. That storm, another Sunday blizzard under another moderate Republican, left much of Queens snowed in for days, and nearly cost Mr. Lindsay reelection.

A political consultant, George Arzt, who was a reporter covering City Hall in 1969, said the “ghost of Lindsay” is still alive. Mr. Arzt said that when he was covering Mayor Koch before becoming a press secretary, the “specter of Lindsay” acted as a motivator.

“For those people who know history, everybody is saying I don’t want to be the next Lindsay,” Mr. Arzt said.

The deputy press secretary for Mr. Lindsay, Robert Laird, said that while he can’t verify it, he has been told that sanitation workers, who were in a bitter dispute with the mayor over a contract, were riding around with their plows up. Mr. Doherty, who was working as a sanitation worker then, said he remembers that the orders to go out didn’t come in until late.

Nonetheless, he said, that storm made mayors even more diligent about clearing the roadways and getting the city functioning after a big storm.