Happy Blackout Anniversary!
Three communities near Cleveland, Ohio celebrated the fifth anniversary of the big lights-out by having another blackout.
Joe My God reminisces: "I went home to my then-apartment on Bleecker Street where my roommate and I sat on the fire escape and read by his leftover menorah candles. Days later we learned that apparently we were the only gays in town not dancing in the streets or enjoying giant impromptu sex parties in flashlight-lit bars."
We missed that too: we walked from West 50th Street to Williamsburg, half-enjoying the crowds camped outside high-rise hotels, citizen traffic cops, bonfire street parties, and the general air of friendly cooperation, which New Yorkers always seem to pull off in a pinch.
What did you do?
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After throwing out everything in our refrigerator that was going bad, we took our then-two-year-old daughter to the playground across the street on First and Houston Streets, where the neighbors were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers. There was a kiddie pool for the children being fed from the sprinklers. The kids splashed and ran around, and we had a chance to hang out and talk with our neighbors late into the night before going back to our dark apartments.
Randi Hoffman
Lower East Side
I lived in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, at the time. As soon as I found out from my neighbors that there wasn't any terrorism afoot, I walked quickly to the deli to stock up on ice and cold Coronas. Having secured an adequate supply, my wife and I sat out on our stoop drinking the cold Coronas, which weren't cold enough. After the novelty of the dark streets wore off, we went indoors and played cards by candlelight and bitched about the heat. I've read that there was supposedly a mini baby boom after the blackout of November 1965. The last thing I wanted to do on that night in August 2003, however, was to get close to another hot, sweaty body in the sweltering, airless bedroom.
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 2:34PMMy wife and I were taking Amtrak to Newark Airport so we could catch a fight to a wedding where I was the best man. We made it out of Penn Station, through the tunnel and got just to the Jersey side when the power went out.
The train inched along to the Newark Airport station, we somehow got to the airport, but it too was without power. So I managed to call the one friend I had in Central Jersey who, like a saint (he was Irish at any rate), came to pick us up, called the airline to get a flight out of Philly, then called a cab who'd drive us from my friend's house at 5 next morning.
Made the wedding by about a hour.
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 2:53PMShortly before the blackout, I had just purchased an old car from a friend that I intended to drive up to college in a few weeks. The car was a manual transmission, and I was learning to drive it around Queens. Most of the driving I had been doing was with someone else in the car, but on the day of the blackout, we decided that my first trip alone was going to be after dropping a friend off in Whitestone.
As soon as I get in the car by myself, all the traffic lights go out and I have to cross Northern Boulevard and several other dangerous streets all by myself. It wasn't organized yet for people to start stopping traffic sporadically, so I just had to weak for a break and pray that I could get the thing started. I was terrified the entire way, but made it home safely.
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 3:38PMI had just landed in the International Terminal at JFK and was waiting for my baggage. Fortunately I had found my bag before the outage. Unfortunately I was stuck in the this technicolor nightmare of endless tile for three days and nights. I slept by curling up on top of my suitcase because the tile was too hard. I couldn't buy any food because all I had in my wallet was Sterling. The sinks and toilets in the bathroom wouldn't work, I'll leave that description alone.
The one wonderful memory that I have though is meeting another couple who had some French wine in their suitcase. I told them that I had smuggled some cheese in from the Cotswolds. We sat down to enjoy our feast and over the next fifteen minutes six more people joined us. A couple from China who had brought Dragon Eye fruit asked if they could share our cheese and wine for some of their fruit. Even a woman who only had Starburst candy begged to be let into our collective. We cut up the Starburst candies into quarters for desert and we all truly felt that we had eaten the most wonderful repast in our lives at that time (although in retrospect we know it wasn't).
What a bizarre experience!. Finally, after a couple of days water and snacks were brought into the airport and shortly thereafter the power returned. The experience was awful at the time that I was there, but it is a story I will never forget. That in itself is priceless I suppose, life is simply a string of memories in some ways ... and what a crazy memory that will always be. :-)
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 4:28PMI was working in Midtown at 53rd & Park. My co-workers and I could just tell from looking out the window that the blackout was everywhere and not just a block or two. Being an expert on everything electrical through my seeing one Discovery Channel documentary on previous blackouts, I quipped "Power's not coming back on anytime soon." Our building management confirmed my analysis and we all headed down the stairs.
When we got out on Park, it was total chaos. Cars were everywhere but not moving. And where cars weren't in a space, someone was standing there. My plan was to head over to the West Side and walk up the bike path along the Hudson to my apartment at 181 & Ft. Washington. Because of all the cars and humans, it took me 45 minutes to walk from Park to the Hudson.
Realizing that the city water system would probably be affected, I stopped in one of the grocery stores on 10th Ave. and bought as much water as I could carry. What I didn't realize is that even a few gallons of water weighs a lot and carrying it 130 blocks sucks beyond belief. But the good news is that it was so hot that I had to end up drinking half of the water anyway and didn't have to carry it.
Almost 4 hours after I started walking, I got to my apartment. My wife was waiting outside for me as she had gotten a ride to Fort Washington in a van driven by some techies and cast from one of the big Broadway shows. Fortunately, we had most of a fruit basket left over from our honeymoon the weekend before. So we spent the night in our underwear in our dark, hot-ass apartment all the while eating grapes and cursing the part of the Bronx we could see had power.
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 5:35PMWe were sitting outside waiting for friends to arrive and then go to the Iggy Pop concert that night when the neighbors started trickling home from work to tell us the news of a potential blackout. No Iggy that night but our yard turned into party central as we were the only ones with a battery powered tv set. Actually it was a good time except for the bloody heat and mosquitos. The nearby restuarants all cooked their food and served it free to firemen, cops, and ambulance drivers. No ice in town but a neighbor drove to Ohio to pick some up, just to keep the beer cold!
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 6:22PMI had just gotten a cavity filled at my dentist in Chinatown. It was also my younger sister's birthday and I was going to give her a call as soon as the novocane wore off and I could talk.
I hopped on my Vespa and headed to Astor Place to get my anti-infection scrip filled. On my way up, I noticed that mny traffic lights were stuck, flashing, or off and thought that maybe it was some kind of short in the system - no big whoop. By the time I got to Houston & Lafayette, I saw huge, black clouds of smoke coming from a building, and suddenly there were HUNDREDS of people on the street, yelling about not getting cell service. The KMart is dark! Starbucks is pitch black inside! I asked a Cop what was going on. "Aaaah, some damn electrical crap. It'll be back on on an hour." Great. I hope I don't get an infection in my gums. I notice that my cell will be dead soon. I call my father and sister to tell them I'm alive, and will call again when I get home. I call my boyfriend and ask him what the deal is in Brooklyn. "Hey babe, we're all whooping it up - the corner Bodega is having a BBQ and giving away all of the ice cream! - hurry up and get over here!"
So I began to ride back to Brooklyn. Thousands of people and cars all over the streets, NOT MOVING! I'm oh so happy that I'm riding a scooter and can lane split, ride around, and through traffic with ease. Lots of folks offer me cash to take them across the bridge but I don't have a spare helmet. Damn I could have cleaned up!
It's getting dark and looking like a zombie movie as I get closer to the Manhattan Bridge. I feel like Mad Max as I swerve around cars, go the wrong way down one way streets, my jaw begins to throb. But I make it to my boyfriends place and join the party...with a bag of frozen peas on my face.
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 6:45PMI walked from my office on 45th Street to a bus stop in front of the NY Public Library, hoping to at least get a ride downtown before walking the rest of the way to Brooklyn. There was a large crowd at the bus stop waiting patiently for the next vehicle to arrive. When a bus approached, two women, both of whose faces had expressions of animal ferocity, forced their way through the crowd to the front, then forced their way onto what was already a very crowded bus. Stuffed, in fact. Cries in the crowd to the two women to wait their turn fell, of course, on deaf ears. Now people in and outside the bus began yelling at the two interlopers to get off the bus because they couldn’t really fit inside and were thus delaying the vehicle’s departure. This got no reaction from the two women. Eventually, the bus departed, and another arrived and was quickly stuffed as well.
Realizing that I wasn’t going to get on a bus for quite a while, I started walking down Fifth Avenue. A number of other people were doing the same, and as we reached 23rd Street, the crowds on the streets had swelled to the point that vehicular traffic was all but impossible. I ended up walking down the Bowery, where people were sitting outside their businesses in the heat, many with pitchers of water set atop folding tables for dehydrating pedestrians. I ended up walking all the way to Grand Army Plaza where, being diabetic and having concluded a 5 mile hike just at my regularly scheduled dinner time, I suddenly weakened and had to collect myself before walking the final 5 blocks to my apartment.
All in all, it was fun. Good exercise, too. And I got to see masses of humanity, mostly at its best, some at its worst. In that sense, it was also educational.
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 8:41PMI was down near city hall and my first thought, of course, was to go on a crime spree, but there are no stores there worth looting in that part of Manhattan, J&R is pretty much all they got and with all the cops down there, I decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and bust out some cheese cake from Junior's. Imagine my horror when I got to the other side and there was Marty Markowitz shaking everyone's hands and yelling nonsense about the Brooklyn being the greatest city in the world. I bumped into him pretty hard, lifted his keys and wallet and headed over to borough hall. I look quite a bit like Marty so with his ID I was able to get into his office. I used his keys to open all his drawers and closets and was disgusted to find a room filled with blow up sex dolls dressed up in clown costumes and makeup. And what was really sick was that one of them looked like my wife. I lost my temper thinking about that sicko fucking a blow up doll that looked like my wife in a clown cosutume and poked holes in all of the other dolls. Wifey, I deflated gently and folded into my backpack. Then I headed down to the bordello row on Coney Island Boulevard and made a night of it on it on Marty's credit cards. Of course the machines weren't working, but they new him well and I was able to leave the cards with a promise to return. Somehow I woke up around 11 am in Prospect Park, which was full of West Indians grilling out in the shade. I hung around the drum circle, ate my fill of Jerk chicken, played a little volleyball with the Salvadorans, then passed out in the shade after a number of Coronas. So all in all, it wasn't a crime spree like I'd read about in Basketball Diaries, but it wasn't a bad day. Not a bad day at all.
Posted On: Thursday, Aug. 14 2008 @ 11:59PMI had just bought some undewear at A&S, and was getting out of the elevator when the power went. It wasn't til I hit the street that I realized what had happened. Traffic was a nightmare, and buses were completely getting packed. I walked to my mom's (who lives by Lincoln Center), had to walk up 14 flights to her apt., and I hung out there for awhile. But I really wanted to get back to my apt., in Inwood, to make sure my cats were okay. So I waited until it was late, figuring the buses would be less crowded. They were, and I had a fascinating trip uptown as the bus navigated the dark streets. Made it home, fed the kitties, and that's about it. Glad I didn't get stuck in the elevator, though.
Posted On: Friday, Aug. 15 2008 @ 1:44AMI was in NYC from the west coast on business that week and mostly spent in midtown. The morning of the blackout I'd taken Metro North to Poughkeepsie (where I'd once lived) for work and to visit friends, my plan to return on Metro North late (my hotel was the Hilton on Sixth.)
A coworker and I were in a sunlit room and didn't even know the lights had gone out. Someone wandered out of their office and said "I was on the phone, it went bzzzt and then the lights went out." Finding phones that did work, we eventually realized that whatever exactly had happened it was big.
Eventually giving up any hope of making it back to Manhattan, a friend offered his spare bedroom. We navigated streets without traffic lights, and with little other to do found ourselves near his apartment in Wappingers Falls at an Irish pub's patio lit by tiki torches, drinking Guinness (finally at the right temperature!) and eating potato chips, looking up at a night sky not diluted by light pollution. A lovely view and a healthy and nutritious dinner (the Guinness at least...).
The next day the usually not quite 2 hours trip back to Grand Central took about 6 hours, as the signaling system was still dropping out intermittently and the train either crawled along or simply stopped... Finally made it to my hotel about 5 pm, same clothes I'd left in the day before.
Ironically, I probably had a better sleeping situation than had I stayed in the city the day before. I was told that hotels wouldn't let their guests climb stairs to their (in my case the 23rd) upper floor rooms!
Posted On: Friday, Aug. 15 2008 @ 11:39AMIn 2005, I was living in Brooklyn but working in Newark, NJ. When the power went out, I had this irresistible feeling similar to what I had on Sept 11, 2001: I wanted to go home and be in my apartment. I convinced my friends/colleagues Amy and Monica that we could walk back to the City. I figured that I ran the marathon, I could walk 10 miles (looking back, I see how crazy this was). For some reason, they agreed and we started out. I remember getting ice cream to fuel our walk. On the eastern edge of Newark, we managed to get a cab to Jersey City. Worried that the driver was going to rip us off, we asked to be dropped off several blocks from the Hudson River. Later the cabbie saw us walking and yelled "Suckas!" (or something like that) at us. We walked the rest of the way, boarded a ferry headed towards, rather than away, from the city. We made it to Manhattan and passed the crowds waiting to go back to NJ. I continued alone to Brooklyn across the bridge. On the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Borough president Marty Markowitz was on a megaphone yelling "You did it! You made it back home to Brooklyn!". When I got back to Cobble Hill, I was amazed at how bright the moonlight was. I waited at home for my boyfriend who ended up spending the night at work and partying with his coworkers. In hindsight, I wish I had wandered around Manhattan to enjoy the street parties rather than giving into my survivalist instincts.
Posted On: Friday, Aug. 15 2008 @ 11:51AMA few days prior, I had gone with my friend to help him move to Montreal for school. As I wasn't doing anything else at the time, I was staying with him and exploring the strange city. It was a hot day. I had gone out to find a laundromat, and, not speaking French nor owning a cell phone, was at this task awhile. Eventually I found one, dumped my clothes in, and realized that I was lost. I spent the next two hours wandering around, trying to remember what Rue I had walked down before the other Rue - the one with the lamps, not the one with the building...
Eventually I found my way back to his apartment, where he'd been...sleeping or unpacking or something. I walked in, and he asked, "Did you hear what happened?" I hadn't; images of another 9/11 flashed through my mind. In the increased security that would surely follow such an event, how would I cross back to the USA? Et cetera, et cetera. But then he informed me that it was only a power failure, although a pretty big one. We got on with the day and went to two museums: one of Art and one of Modern Art.
Posted On: Friday, Aug. 15 2008 @ 2:41PMWhen the blackout hit, I was at Newark Airport picking up my mother and sister. The power crashed literally as they emerged from the concourse, which meant we were stranded on the 1&9 driving back to the city in bumper-to-bumper traffic. We saw people scrambling out of a PATH train stuck on the bridge, and got passed by hordes of people who'd just said to hell with it and started walking.
It was my sister's first time to the city. She hasn't been back.
Posted On: Friday, Aug. 15 2008 @ 11:34PMdrunk in connecticut think this mostly true
thursday afternoon immediate liquor store vodka paid real money found major petty cash copped hundred bucks free drinks local watering hole at least hundred people walking home thinking self appointed traffic cops have waited forever for this day would not want to befriend them
thursday night parked pickup smack in front of building seating possibly alfresco sleeping place sat on stoop watching listening festivities drums trash cans aflame jumped high fence kiddy pool cooled down loving problem neighborhood with problem people
friday morning woke up hungry stood on wood oven pizza lines only game in town drank vodka watched police vans sidewalks taking charge running off solving emergencies jumped high fence kiddy pool cooled down drank vodka loving problem neighborhood with problem people
friday afternoon hung with neighbors whole building meeting each other near pickup friend wanting cold drink drove truck promised to take her somewhere involving jersey ice specific words ms katz promise you cold drink uptown realized everyone but east village had lights
came back iced entire building drank more vodka sleep
wasn't there also saturday
Posted On: Saturday, Aug. 16 2008 @ 9:47PMIn August of 2003 I was working on an archaeology dig on Staten Island. Myself and the rest of crew were on the Staten Island expressway heading to Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn when the black out hit. One girl from the crew decided to take her chances and walked home to the Village via the Brooklyn Bridge. The rest of us including my boss decided to hunker down in a local bar. I wound up barbacking for bit helping to move cold beer up from the basement to the bar so we could all keep drinking.
A couple of hours later we returned to the crew member's house that was in Carroll Gardens to listen to one of those hand crank powered radios while we continued to drink any and all cold beer we could get our hands on. The area of Brooklyn around us had turned to bedlam with people partying in the streets.
Around 11:00 pm or so, my boss who had a pickup truck decided to try heading north to his home in New Rochelle. The drive north on the BQE was crazy. The dark skyline set was visible with the full moon that was up and it gave the city an end of the world kind of vibe. We made it as far as my place in Astoria where we got stoned and my boss crashed on my futon.
Posted On: Sunday, Aug. 17 2008 @ 8:21PM
About half an hour after the lights went a chorus of shouts rose in the elevator lobby. I was still at work, in our office on West 31st Street, where the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows made it possible for us to hang out and bitch about Con Ed until we felt like figuring out how to make our respective escapes. My own escape, as it involved nothing more challenging than getting to southern harlem, was nothing for me to worry about – most days I walked to work anyway, this would simply be a reverse trip. But Oy and Vay the Long Islanders and BBQ crowd, though in the minority at our tiny (back then) dot-com, were really doing the hand-wringing proud: cell phones going, detailing fantasies of sleeping on the Post Office steps (the big Farley anthrax branch was just a block away) and being accosted by rough New Yorkers in the night were at full throttle when all the hollering started.
I had to snake, somewhat rudely, through a few rows of close-packed bodies to see what was going on. Our facilities manager (not a very large person) and our network admin (a VERY big Irish guy named Declan) were going at one of the elevator doors with a couple of small crowbars. People were calling out, “Get Derrick!” and Derrick, our hugely muscled mailroom guy, was no doubt the best-qualified crowbar-operator in the crew; I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t seem to be around. The office door (which swung loose after the badging system “failed safe” and left everything unlocked) opened and someone passed a massive crowbar, big granddaddy crowbar, above the spectating heads in the lobby. Declan grabbed it and hollered, “Stand back!” (not that he needed to; one look at sweaty, fired-up Declan swinging that bar was enough to crush us all back against the wall, shrinking lilies in the middle of a mosh pit). It was hot Hot HOT in there with the a/c off, we stuck to each other, cotton to denim to poly, a big, damp, quivering clot of onlookers hoping for…what? Not a lot of time to wonder about that – three back-wrenching heaves with the Godzilla Crowbar and the elevator split apart like a pair of too-tight pants finally giving way at the butt.
And there was Derrick, eyes rolling back in his sweaty head, giving Declan the brother handshake and holding one hand to his heaving chest like a virgin bride at the altar, sprung loose at last from prison. Derrick was a guy who traded on his fearlessness, the type who would get really really close to you with his really really big buff body when telling you he wasn’t going to do whatever reasonable thing it was you asked for him to do. He’d edge close, very close, talking very low, never saying what he was thinking: how he could take you out with no effort at all but somehow letting you know that he was thinking about crushing your windpipe, not about the boxes you needed to have unloaded in the dock. He never said that he wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody, he walked it and breathed it and emanated it; fearlessness poured off of him like narcotic smoke out of a hookah.
But he was scared to death in that lightless little box. And dozens of us had seen him in his fear.
Things in facilities were never the same after that.
And there was Derrick, eyes rolling back in his sweaty head, giving Declan the brother handshake and holding one hand to his heaving chest like a virgin bride at the altar, sprung loose at last from prison. Derrick was a guy who traded on his fearlessness, the type who would get really really close to you with his really really big buff body when telling you he wasn’t going to do whatever reasonable thing it was you asked for him to do.
Posted On: Friday, Aug. 29 2008 @ 9:46AM
