Moses drove thousands of workers outdoors through the coldest winter in New York history.

Evidence

The winter of 1934 was the first of five of the most severe in New York’s history. The temperature dropped below zero on five different days—on one day it hit fourteen below—and a steady succession of heavy storms dumped a total of fifty-two inches of snow on the city. The mean temperature for the entire month of February was 11.5 degrees. But all through that winter, the residents of the tall apartment houses rimming Central Park could look down into the park and see, in the snow, thousands of men swinging pickaxes and shovels, climbing ladders set against trees, swarming over scaffolding erected around older structures and building new ones. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1636

Categorization

• XREF: Chronology links this to ch7’s point about winter nights at the Bureau; but chiefly this sets up the Casino revenge that closes the chapter. — connects to: Threatening to quit forced the CWA to abandon its hiring rules for Moses. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1625