NEW YORK: Crime is down. Joggers have disappeared from Central Park. Office workers have stopped going out for a smoke. Even the hardy city pigeons have sought refuge in the heated cabins of the Staten Island ferries, writes Conor O'Clery.
A bitter, wind-driven cold is gripping New York after two balmy winters. Yesterday morning the temperature in Central Park - where skaters are out on the boat pond for the first time in a decade - was minus 10 degrees.
For the ninth consecutive day the mercury stayed below zero. The record is 16 days set in 1961. The sea has frozen on Long Island shores and stretches of the Hudson up-river from the Bronx are ice-covered for the first time in many years. It will get even colder today and tomorrow as another frigid air mass is sucked across the North Pole from Siberia and down into the north-eastern United States.
This "polar vortex" is to blame for a raw, dry cold so harsh that New Yorkers are being warned about frostbite. Mr Tim Morrin of the National Weather Service warned that frostbite and hypothermia can set in in less than half an hour.
"If your nose turns white," advised a cold weather expert, "get inside, otherwise you might lose it."