Hurricane Sandy Dispatch From New York To Miami: This Storm Blows

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A darkened New York City skyline

The morning of Monday, October 29 dawned cloudy and a little windy in New York City, which came as a surprise to the eight million or so inhabitants who had expected God himself to be pissing on the city at the break of dawn.

The national media had been breathlessly predicting the End of Days for the East Coast. The culprit: Hurricane Sandy, the most destructive storm named after a Grease character since Hurricane Kenickie slammed into Rydell High School and ruined the senior prom. The city was told to expect everything: 100-mile-per-hour winds, two feet of rain, blood to replace the East River. Accordingly, the city's airports canceled virtually every flight out from Sunday night straight through Tuesday, leaving tens of thousands of travelers stranded. That included your intrepid weather correspondent, in town originally for the weekend but now stuck here for almost the entire week. Guess what, Miami? This storm was not f*%#ng around.

See also:
- Hurricane Sandy: A Message To The Northeast From Miami

The irony of leaving Miami -- Mother Nature's long preferred dumping grounds for hellacious wind and rain storms -- for New York, only to get stuck in a hurricane here, was not lost on me. But I was determined to experience a hurricane, be it in South Florida or the Northeast, so I foolishly ventured into the storm to see, first-hand, whether Sandy had anything to offer -- or whether, as Riptide suggested yesterday, we were all overreacting just a tad.

Appropriately enough, the Miami Deli on the corner of St. Nicholas and 128th Street in Harlem stayed open through the hurricane. So did the Florida Deli right down the street.

The New York Post and New York Daily News went with the simple approach to the storm.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Harlem, nothing was safe from the winds of Sandy, not even our sister publication, the Village Voice.