Blackout redux

It was 30 years ago that New York City was plunged into darkness (again)--and this
time, looters came out before the lights came back out.

It's astonishing how much the city has changed, for the better, since then--much of the period articles almost read more as if they're movie reviews of Escape From New York, Batman or Soylent Green than actual dispatches from the flesh and blood city.

The Times' perpetual reporting machine Sewall Chan has pulled together a nice section looking back at the coverage of the blackout that features some great first-person accounts from users who were there.

Although, oddly, no HTML links to the original Times reporting.

Nevertheless, via the magic of a PDF link in a photo caption, we start with the authoritative Times, and their now-legendary (and still working) spot news man, Robert D. McFadden: Power Failure Blacks Out New York; Thousands Trapped in Subways; Looters and Vandals Hit Some Areas

A power failure plunged New York City and Westchester County into darkness last night, disrupting the lives of nearly nine million people.

Spokesmen for the Consolidated Edison Company said that power for all of its 2.8 million customers would not be restored until late this mornign.

By 2 A.M., the utility had restored power to 150,000 customres in the Jamaica, Flushing, Queens Village and Kew Gardens sections of Queens, and to 50,000 customers in the Pleasantville area in Westchester County.

Thought not as big as the nine-state blackout that hit the Northeast in November 1965, last night's power failure was in some respects an uglier experience. There was widespread looting in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn, and four hours after the blackout began, the police had arrested nearly 900 people.

Several thousand subway riders were trapped in trains between stations--but nowhere near the masses stranded 12 years ago during the rush hour.

With hindsight, the subhead should've put the Looters part about the subway part, since that's what was different about this blackout.

But a masterpiece of concise, this is what happened and this is what you need to know writing. If the looting seems a little undercovered, it's because they broke that part out into the left margin article, by Lawrence Van Gelder.

The PDF of the front page is worth reading; other pieces cover how people helped their neighbors, explained what exactly happened with the lightning bolt, covered the subways, noted Long Island was fine, and detailed doctors at Bellevue using hand-squeezed air bags to resusciate some patients.

Next, the Daily News' lead article, written by Dick Brass: Blackout! Lighting Hits Con Ed System

A massive power failure plunged New York City and most of Westchester County into darkness in sweltering midsummer weather last night, stranding millions in buildings, disrupting communications, slowing fire-fighting efforts, encouraging looting and evoking grim memories of the great 1965 Northeast power collapse.

A Con Ed spokesman blamed the blackout on severe lightning strikes at about 8:40 p.m. on a 345 kilovolt transmission cable suspended across the Hudson River to the company's nuclear plant at Indian Point on the Hudson. The lightning strikes led to what the spokesman called a "cascading effect" that shut down the power system at about 9:30 p.m.

I think Brass tries to do too much with his lead, and in trying to put it all in context leaves you breathless.

In contrast to today's paper, the rest of the News piece is written in a very dry tone; it's facts-on-a-stick, no real personality.

The next day's News lead article, by Donald Singleton, is better and reflects that the News, like just about everyone else, missed the lead the previous night: Lights Go on, End Nightmare: 3,400 Jailed, 558 Cops Hurt in 25 Hours of Terror

The Great Blackout of 1977 ended late last night after 25 hours that saw the city racked by arson and looting in a night and day of "terror."

The awakening from the total power blackout left many streets littered with ugly debris, and a strange, groggy day of empty skyscrapers and locked stores and hushed subways and streets without traffic lights, and buildings that were burning for no sensible reason.

Oddly, the New York Post doesn't have their original coverage up; instead, they've been running boring lookbacks.

The Times' Joyce Purnick, who was at the Post then, remembers what it was like: The ’77 Blackout: Inside the Command Center

I was a reporter at The New York Post then, a mayoral election was under way, I was covering it, and the blackout hit just as I was leaving The Post’s office downtown on South Street that very hot summer night. I ran up the stairs to the city room, said I would find the mayor, Abe Beame, ran back down the stairs, and walked over to City Hall. It was deserted. ...

There were frequent briefings — many by the shirt-sleeved mayor, who was 71 at the time. Throughout the night and into the morning hours, he and members of his administration reflected confidence that the city would get through the emergency, that the mayor was in firm control of a tough situation. “You couldn’t buy this attention,’’ said one of Mr. Beame’s political deputies, obviously confident his candidate had done well.

I still wonder whether they were not fully aware of the city’s trauma that night. Because reporters in the command center didn’t get a valid sense of the city’s reality. We were in a bunker, living on shards of fact, fragments of information, in an era, remember, without cellphones and text-messaging, and on a night without television.

Only later did we learn about the extent of the chaos and looting in the South Bronx, Harlem and in Bushwick. In pockets of the city — in lower Manhattan where the mayor toured hospitals and fire houses at 2 a.m. — things were calm. And in other pockets, New Yorkers were frightened of New Yorkers. In some places New Yorkers were abusing their neighbors.

Only when I got back to The Post the next day did I realize the destructive toll the blackout had taken.

Beame's aides thinking they had handled things well has gotta be one of the all-time political blunders.

Finally, Time magazine's article after the blackout shows the advantages of its extra time, with a great lead and all sorts of interesting details that didn't need to be filed over the phone or by candlelight (oddly enough, there's no byline on the piece): Night of Terror

It was a crisis of light, and of darkness—the kind of event that brings out the best and the worst in people. Certainly the 1965 blackout could never happen again, or so New Yorkers had thought. But something very much like it struck Wednesday the 13th, only this time it was frighteningly different. Through the long, sweaty night and most of the following day, the nation's largest city was powerless, lacking both the electricity on which it depends so heavily and any means to stop a marauding minority of poor blacks and Hispanics who, in severe contrast to 1965, went on a rampage, the first since the hot summer riots of the 1960s. They set hundreds of fires and looted thousands of stores, illuminating in a perverse way twelve years of change in the character of the city, and perhaps of the country. ...

At Hearn's department store in Brooklyn, youths stripped clothing from window mannequins, broke their limbs and scattered them on the floor. Said Miguel Ten, a Viet Nam veteran who stood guarding Arnet's Children's Wear store: "This reminds me of Pleiku in 1966. There was a war out here. And the mannequins remind me of the dead people I saw in Nam without legs and arms." ...

Many looters seemed scarcely aware that they were stealing. Said one of two black boys standing outside a stripped bicycle shop near Columbia University: "We're just out shopping with our parents. This is better than going to Macy's." Some blacks resented all the fuss over the looting. Said Lorraine, 14, who had helped plunder a drugstore in East Harlem: "It gets dark here every night. Every night stores get broke into, every night people get mugged, every night you scared on the street. But nobody pays no attention until a blackout comes."

More people than just store owners had to make fresh starts on the morning after the night of darkness. Rose Stevens, an elderly widow, wandered weeping down Broadway in Brooklyn, looking for a new place to live after spending the night alone in her $57-a-month apartment above a meat market that had been burned out by vandals. "I wish I died," she cried. "I'm almost 70 years old, and I have no place to go."

Many black and Hispanic leaders across the country were dismayed by the rioting. In a typical comment, Carlos Castro, president of Chicago's Puerto Rican United Front, noted that the plunderers were poor and lived in slum housing, though he said of the violence: "You can't justify it." So far, there were no signs of a white backlash, even though many broadcast and newspaper accounts of the power failure emphasized the disorders. Sample headline from the Los Angeles Times: CITY'S PRIDE IN ITSELF GOES DIM IN THE BLACKOUT. Newspapers abroad also focused on the looting. A headline from Tokyo's Mainichi Shimbun: PANIC GRIPS NEW YORK; from West Germany's Bild Zeitung: NEW YORK'S BLOODIEST NIGHT; from London's Daily Express: THE NAKED CITY. ...

Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers and visitors responded to the crisis with some of the same good humor and willingness to help each other that they had exhibited twelve years earlier. At Beame's request, stores, banks and most offices closed, reducing traffic on the city's streets. At the intersection of Park Avenue and 79th Street in Manhattan, an athletic young man wearing a cape and holding a pink flare controlled traffic like a matador handling a bull. On the other side of the island, traffic was directed on Riverside Drive by David Epstein, 17 He joked: "My mother told me to go out and play in the traffic, and here I am." Sixteen passers-by turned Coney Island's 150-ft.-high Wonder Wheel by hand, enabling stranded riders to reach the ground. ...

Few bars remained open, and they were packed with thirsty people even though their ice supplies were rapidly melting. Said one woman who had visited three other bars before she stopped at P.J. Clarke's, a well-known East Side watering place: "We're typical New Yorkers. We're going to get smashed." At Elaine's restaurant on Manhattan's upper East Side, tables were moved outdoors for a block party. The guests included Woody Allen, Al Pacino, Andy Warhol and Designer Calvin Klein. At One Fifth, a Greenwich Village restaurant decorated with fittings from the cruise ship R.M.S. Caronia, a patron quipped: "We've hit an iceberg." Pianist Nat Jones scrounged a candle to light his keyboard and played It Ain't Necessarily So. Unfortunately, it was. ...

Times photo of people on Broadway in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn looting by Tyrone Dukes.