Last night's storm tore through the Upper West Side and Central Park, tearing trees out of the ground and throwing them across streets and onto cars. Our weather guru Joe Schumacher said, "Within the larger area of rain there was a smaller, intense area that crossed the Hudson and Upper West Side and then went up through Central Park and Harlem before heading into the Bronx."
Which matches the damage, much of it in Riverside and Central Parks. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said it was a "path of devastation from Riverside Park through Central Park into East Harlem and through Randalls Island." He also said, "The cleanup effort will take days, perhaps weeks to get it fully cleaned up. Central Park Conservancy is bringing in emergency crews, private contractors. The parks department has all five boroughs working. We will assess what's going on in the other boroughs, and if necessary we'll bring in crews from other boroughs into Manhattan where damage appears to be the worst."
However, it was not a tornado, though gusts were up to 80 mph: A National Weather Service meteorologist told the Post, "Evidence we have, looking at our radar data, is that there were no tornado signatures. It was straight line winds."
