LIGHTS
It was July 13, 1977. Manhattan was about to lose its electricity. I was living in the Village and, in the evening, walked west to the Hudson River and out on a long breezy pier, from which I could look north at least as far as the George Washington Bridge. The city was twinkling as always with thousands of lights: office windows and apartments above, vehicles below.
Suddenly the buildings disappeared. It happened in sections of the island, starting in the north, and soon reaching the waterfront near me. Then I could see only headlights. Helped by these moving beams, I made my way back to our apartment a couple blocks south of Washington Square.
People had walked down the stairs of Silver Towers and were clustered outside, under huge concrete sculptures designed by Picasso. The monochrome scene reminded me of one of the artist’s most famous paintings, “Guernica,” a Basque village bombed by the Franco side in the Spanish civil war. Except here there were no explosions, only a stoppage of the blood flow of the city, its electricity. That, and an uncanny silence. We were stunned.
Subway riders were stranded underground as trains came to a halt in tunnels. Traffic lights were extinguished. Looters elsewhere in the city took advantage of the darkness to make off with anything they could carry. When we trudged up to bed, the apartment was hot: no air conditioning.
I had lived through another blackout in Manhattan. The summer before college I was working as a copyboy at the Daily News near Grand Central. Lowly as we were, we were pressed into duty as reporters. I was assigned to walk west on 42nd Street to Times Square and see what had happened there when all the lights on the great white way went dark.
The big story, as usual, was what people took for granted. In this case, that the power would be restored. Life would go on as it had. Meanwhile, yes, play-goers had to stumble out of theaters. Anyone working late in an office had to walk down. Commuters had to fight for hotel rooms. But everybody just knew that electricity would be restored (as it was).
Eighteen years later, in 1977, I shared that assumption. Con Ed workers would find the problem and fix it. The air conditioning would work again, as would refrigerators in our kitchens, in grocery stores, and in restaurants. The next day, dogs knocked over garbage cans containing spoiled meat. Then things were as they had been.