What Blackouts Tell Us

When the power went out in New York City on August 14, 2003, I walked through Manhattan with a friend to her apartment on the Upper West Side. In Times Square I was mesmerized by the enormous black screens that usually scrolled the hieroglyphics of the stock market, and I could suddenly see the façades of normally neon-festooned buildings. My friend couldn’t help recalling the epic violence sparked by the blackout of 1977, but our blackout, with its spontaneous cooperation, night-long dance parties, and buoyant atmosphere, was more like the first great New York blackout. That one occurred 40 years ago today, on November 9, 1965, when the lights blinked off over a vast swath of the Northeast.

At a little after 5 p.m. on November 9, 1965, there was a failure in an electrical relay on the 400-mile-long copper cord that formed the spine of the vast Northeastern power grid. This created a surge that built like a wave along the line, and power flickered out in communities in its wake. By 5:38 p.m., virtually the entire Northeast and parts of Canada were without power.

New York City ground to a halt just after 5:30 p.m., trapping thousands of commuters underground in subways and hundreds more in elevators. As the final rays of sun disappeared from the sky, people awaited disaster. The previous July, protests following the death of a black man at the hands of white police had erupted into violence. Scores of people had been injured, two had died, and looting had gone on for days. Would the city explode again?

It did not. Instead New Yorkers for the most part spent a well-mannered night in the dark. Citizen traffic cops sprang up and unsnarled the mess of cars, gesturing with attaché cases, and groups of people stood outside of stores to prevent looting. Hotels opened their lobbies to the stranded, people flagged down cars for the weak and infirm, and Grand Central Terminal, bathed in emergency lighting, became a giant sleep-away camp.

The staff of Life magazine, trapped in their twenty-ninth floor offices, gamely set up cameras to catch the view out their windows while some of the editors toiled away using torches made from grease pencils. In the resulting blackout issue, the columnist Loudon Wainwright gushed, “It shouldn’t happen every evening, but a crisis like the lights going out has its good points. In the first place it deflates human smugness about our miraculous technology… . Even better is the fact that something happened.” He described an atmosphere of “splendid gaiety” and rejoiced that New Yorkers “ordinarily smug and comfortable in the high hives” had become “humans conscious of and concerned about other humans around them.”

City officials responded with admirable coordination. Mayor Robert Wagner was first reached by telephone in his limousine, and by the time he got to City Hall, firefighters had dragged generators into his office. He directed the police and fire departments to rescue those trapped in subways and to get power to the city’s hospitals. Some 5,000 off-duty cops showed up at their precinct houses, and the National Guard opened its armories to the stranded. Back-up generators at hospitals kicked in, or doctors improvised. Five babies were born that night, a few by candlelight. One hospital pulled volunteers from a nearby restaurant to manually operate iron lungs.

The number of arrests was lower than on a normal night, and fewer than a dozen stores were burglarized. The worst offenses The New York Times reported the next day were committed by hucksters who sold flashlights for a dollar apiece.

Fourteen hours after the lights went out, power was restored and the finger-pointing began. A New York Times editorial sternly warned, “The need now is for a new assessment of how the omnivorous appetite of our industrial society for electric current can be satisfied with anything approaching full security.” The electrical utility industry formed councils to develop standards for equipment testing and emergency power reserves.

Those standards were essentially still in place in 2003 when, yet again, a small power surge led to a catastrophe for the Northeast. But by then the memory of 1965 had been eclipsed by the 25-hour nightmare that had gripped a powerless New York on July 13, 1977. That time a series of lightning strikes led to a city-wide blackout and a metropolis consumed by violence, looting, and arson. More than 3,000 people were arrested and some 1,000 fires raged as firefighters battled not only flames but mobs pelting them with rocks and bricks.

What made the two blackouts so different? Since 1965 the city had gone broke. The police and fire departments were hamstrung by massive layoffs, leaving morale low (40 percent of off-duty police officers didn’t report that night). Riots in Newark and Detroit the previous year had brought attention to conditions in the ghetto, but areas like Bushwick, which saw the worst of the looting, had largely been passed over in the rush of federal and state programs.

By the time of the 2003 blackout, the city had bounced back from the deep malaise of the 1970s, and there were adequate police, firefighters, and paramedics to respond. Mayor Bloomberg even declined offers of help from the National Guard. Urban revitalization and gentrification had led to an increase in mixed-income areas and an easing of inner-city poverty.

The poet Ezra Pound once wrote, “And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… . Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.” When the stars wriggle free of our will, as they are bound to do again, we see both our fragility and our resilience. When the power went out in 1977, it exposed the fault lines of a city fallen victim to bankruptcy, widespread poverty, and urban decay. But in 2003 I could, much like the gleeful reporters at Life magazine 40 years ago, admire the pluck of a city that, given the right resources, is ready for anything. A catastrophe like a blackout—or a hurricane or an earthquake—has a way of exposing the essential strengths and weaknesses of a place.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.