Rest of the Country Still Fascinated with Boston’s Snow

Associated Press

America’s fascination with our record-setting winter continues, thanks to the continued presence of an ugly ice mountain in Boston’s seaport district.

It’s no wonder people are interested in the enormous ice mound that sits in the Seaport District. After all, with every passing day, it’s existence grows more unusual. The temperature gets warmer. The calendar advances toward summer. And still the snow persists, a trash-speckled reminder of our heinous winter woes.

Still, it’s a story that only grows more interesting in increments. What was amusingly unusual on May 6 was only mildly more amusing on May 7. So at what point does the existence of Mt. Snow-lympus pass the threshold and become downright newsworthy? For Boston, it seems to be temperatures so warm, their coexistence with an ice pile is just too bizarre to ignore. That seems to have been the spark that pushed the Boston Globe to publish a small piece on the snow piles and their longevity earlier this week.

That local coverage seems to have spurred a burst of belated national attention today. Many of Friday’s national papers carry an article by the Associated Press on the “three-story pile of dirt and trash — including bicycles, traffic cones and even half a $5 bill — that remains encrusted in solid ice.” The icy pile of crap is news in Los Angeles. It’s news in New York. It’s news in Chicago. Everywhere, it seems, eyes have returned  to Boston and the story of our record-setting winter. “Wait, what?” asks a USA Today headline.

The snow pile makes sense as a local story. It reminds us just how much of an outlier this past winter was. As a national story, it’s a little stranger; after all, there are many places in America that still get snow in late May. What sets Boston apart? The answer, it seems, is the unsightliness of our winter weather residue and the sheer amount of gross stuff lodged in it. (So far, workers have removed 85 tons of debris, the AP notes.) There’s also the fact that the ice pile’s life remains likely to extend well into the future, which you can imagine, suggests that the story of Boston’s long winter nightmare probably won’t stop attracting America’s attention for months to come.