26.9 inches

In this story about the record snowfall by Robert McFadden, about the biggest snowstorm in New York City history, at least since the start of records in 1869, in this story, the writer gets a little out of control toward the end of the story. Obviously, he has higher ambitions than writing weather features for a newspaper and so let's his poetic side take over:

Central Park was a setting from a storybook. Children dragging parents dragging snowboards and sleds converged on all sides in a daylong migration. Large dogs galloped through the drifted meadows of the Great Lawn, and cross-country skiers glided among joggers gallomping in snowshoes.

For many indoors, it was a day to relax by a window, perhaps with a glass of wine and soft jazz on the radio, and take in the unreal loveliness of winter — the panes frosted like glass from Murano, the sills drifted with flourishes of lacework, and, out in the storm, dreamscapes of snow blowing down a street, curtains of snow falling in great sweeps, snow settling like peace in the parks and skeletal woodlands.

In an otherwise anemic winter filled with too many sunny days and too many clichés about spring, the storm elicited something more-or-less poetic from its admirers.

While he seems aware, or at least says he is, of the "too many clichés about spring," he does not seem at all aware of the too many clichés about winter.