Why don’t you stop and think here for a moment. WHERE do they put all that snow? There’s nowhere to plow it to with nothing but streets with buildings on either side especially in Manhattan. They have to truck the snow out. It will make most places in NYC impassable. Ever been there?
Basically, you place it over an open manhole and dump snow into it. It has a diesel-powered engine of some kind that generates heat and melts the snow, and it passes through a filter to screen out debris. The specs that I've seen indicate that it can melt 60 tons of snow in an hour.
Um…yeah. I keep an apartment there.
During true blizzards and huge snow storms, a lot of the snow is pushed up into huge piles on the streets - where it sits for months sometimes. I still have a memory of a major storm in the late 70s, where there were huge, absolutely huge, piles of snow pushed into the gutters of 5th Avenue. Mind-boggling to look at.