It’s the Great White Way — from one end of the city to the other.
Winter’s first blizzard blew into town with gale-force winds and an expected two feet of snow — stymieing travelers and sending city workers out in droves to manage the mess.
“It’s hard to stand up in a 55-mile-an-hour wind, and particularly when the ground under your feet is slippery, so this really is dangerous,” a sneezing and coughing Mayor Bloomberg said hours after Old Man Winter began to deliver his belated Christmas gift.
Nearly 1,500 metro-area flights were canceled, JFK Airport closed, Amtrak service between New York and Boston was iced, and the roadways were a mess — but Bloomberg insisted the city was doing “everything we can … to keep our roads safe and clear.”
Still, subways were getting hammered with snow delays, as were Long Island Railroad trains.
AccuWeather predicted that up to two feet of snow would fall before the two-day blizzard goes away.
But there’s just a snowball’s chance in hell that New York City’s all-time two-day snowfall record —26.9 inches, set Feb. 11-12, 2006 — might melt.
“I think it’s going to fall a little short of that record — maybe a 10 percent chance you could get there,” said AccuWeather meteorologist Erik Pindrock.
Even if it’s not snowing by this afternoon, New Yorkers will set get hit in the face with white stuff.
“The wind will blow it around for much of the day,” Pindrock said.
In Philadelphia, the storm prompted a rare postponement for the NFL.
Last night’s scheduled game between the Eagles and Vikings was moved to tomorrow night.
And on the day after Christmas, when stores expect shoppers back for returns and sales, residents were cruising Home Depot for shovels instead.
“Two thousand shovels just sold out in the last two hours,” said an employee at the Home Depot on Woodhaven Boulevard in Forest Hills, Queens.
The city got busy as well, with more than 2,400 Sanitation Department workers reporting early for long shifts to clean highways, bus routes and all 6,000 miles of city streets.
Sanitation deployed 365 salt spreaders and 1,700 snow plows, the mayor said; and 180,000 tons of salt at 30 locations were at the ready.
The FDNY went into overdrive as well, the mayor said. All 198 engine crews got a fifth person for their regular rigs.
As a result of the blizzard:
*Alternate-side parking rules were suspended.
*There were minor power outages in the city, but on Long Island, thousands of people were in the dark.
*Metro-North will be on a Sunday schedule today, the Long Island Rail Road will be on a holiday schedule, and the Staten Island Ferry will run on its weekend rush-hour schedule. NJ Transit will run on a weekend schedule.
*Alliance for Downtown New York’s fleet of red-coated clean-up crews will clear streets and sidewalks around Wall Street before rush hour.
*Parks will sponsor “snow day” activities at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Manhattan’s Riverside Park, the Bronx’s Crotona Park, Queens’ Juniper Valley Park and Staten Island’s Clove Lakes Park.
Tourists were delighted by the storm.
“We came to New York wanting a white Christmas and we got it!” exclaimed Juliet Nota, 42, of Perth, Australia, as she visited the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
Madrid visitor Luis Gomez, 28, also was enthralled.
“I think if it’s this cold out, it might as well be snowing … We’re having a great time,” he said.
The mayor said costs be damned for the clean-up.
“We’re going to plow the snow, clean the streets and then worry about how to pay for it,” he said.
“Given our budget crisis, the cost of one snowstorm is very small.”
sgoldenberg@nypost.com