From the air, some neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens looked like Lego masterpieces that angry children had done their best to sweep aside.

Trees remained sprawled along the stately streets of Forest Hills, Queens. Two telephone-pole-thick pieces of one storm-ruined tree still blocked a street, pinning a blue sedan to the pavement.

On Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after a violent storm that included two tornadoes killed one woman and tore across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, traffic flowed, trains rolled from station to station and schoolchildren swarmed playgrounds.

But the cleanup was in full swing: in Park Slope, Brooklyn, two men in T-shirts maneuvered around the roof of a brownstone, sawing away the limbs of a toppled tree and tossing them into the yard below. Down the block, a blue tarpaulin that covered a gash in the face of a building flapped in the breeze.