Joe's Musings: Mayor LaGuardia D'anton

François Villon, the 15th century French poet, wrote a well-known ballad that mourns the loss of several illustrious women of the ages, including Joan of Arc and Abelard's Heloise. The familiar last line of each stanza laments, "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?", translated "But where are the snows of yester-year?"

One winter in the 1930s, during Mayor LaGuardia's term, an extremely heavy snowfall halted all activity in New York City's financial district. I remember reading an editorial in the New York Herald Tribune. It seems that the city had just purchased a much vaunted snow-removal machine. The article’s accompanying photo depicts the mayor dressed in the uniform of a NYC Sanitation Department foreman. Always a visionary with a gift for practical application, LaGuardia is shown in the canyons of Wall Street, at the wheel of this gigantic machine.

The last sentence of the editorial rephrased Villon: "Où sont les neiges Downtown?"

© Joe Zito, 2008