The Night New York City Went Dark. It Happened 46 Years Ago This Week

A personal remembrance of the Blackout of July 1977

Bushwick, Brooklyn, July 14, 1977, photo credit: Cuquita06051

It was mid-July 1977 and it was hot. It had been for days. Daytime temperatures ran into the 90's and stayed there even at night. This was my first New York City summer. I would get used to it in the years to follow, but this was a shock. Growing up in Los Angeles, I was not unfamiliar with hot weather. This was different. It was steamy and oppressive. Worse, I lived in a tiny room in an SRO (single room occupancy building) without air conditioning. In those days, the subway trains were not air conditioned either. People still went to the movies to cool off.

The 13th of July was Wednesday. That evening, I went home from my new job as a reporter at the United Press International wire service - I had started just two weeks earlier - and then went by the apartment of a college friend, Larry, to check his mail. Larry had applied to medical school and was awaiting word whether he had been accepted. He was out of town that week, so I had agreed to get his mail every day and see if there was any word.

I was leafing through his correspondence when the lights went out. I sat there waiting for the power to come back on. Minutes passed. Nothing. From the hallway, I heard voices speaking with a hushed urgency. I opened the door to investigate. The hallway was dark. A few shadowy figures were talking.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

A man said sharply, “Who are you?”

I said I was a friend of Larry which satisfied him. He said the entire building, maybe the whole block, was without power. 

No point staying. I went outside and walked to the corner. At West End Avenue, a major north-south thoroughfare, I looked south from 75th Street. The city was dark below 72nd Street. I turned around and looked north. Everything was still illuminated. It was bewildering. I looked south again, then north - no more than three seconds later-- and now everywhere was dark except for the headlights of passing cars.

My car was parked at the corner. I got in and turned on the radio, tuned it to an all-news station. The announcer was saying the entire city was blacked out. But, he said, the situation was calm. 

“It just goes to show you," he said with what sounded a little like pride, "New Yorkers can handle anything.”

I went to a bar on 72nd Street to get a beer. It was packed. People jostled one another and were talking excitedly. I couldn't quite figure out why. I said to someone, “Isn’t this normal? Doesn’t this happen every summer?” Somehow I had it in my mind that New York suffered blackouts regularly.

The person I said this to looked at me as if I were an idiot (probably because what I had just said was idiotic) and said to me, “No. This isn't normal." Even then, I did not fully grasp just how extraordinary it all was.

I went outside. There were people everywhere, far more than usual for 10 p.m. on a summer weeknight.  At intersections, where the traffic signals were out, people were taking charge, directing vehicles. It was funny. It was all great fun.

I went back to my car to listen to the radio. The same radio announcer who had earlier praised New Yorkers' equanimity sounded different. His tone was serious. I could tell something had changed. 

"We are getting reports now of sporadic looting," he said.

Photo credit: Cuquita06051

I called the office. I spoke to my boss, the city editor. I could hear phones ringing and people speaking loudly in the background. He told me they had the situation well covered but to keep checking in. I went back to my building, climbed the ten flights of stairs in darkness. I opened the windows to allow in a breeze and then lay down on the narrow single bed.  I kept calling the office every hour. Same thing: We don't need you yet. Keep checking in. When I called some time after midnight, I was told to come in at dawn if the power was still out.

What had happened I would learn later was a succession of three lightning strikes that hit three different Con Edison power substations, followed by desperate but ultimately unsuccessful measures over the next hour to keep the power flowing, but the system overloaded. At 9:37 p.m., the lights went out in New York City. New Jersey, with a different power source, was fine. Across the Hudson, the buildings were illuminated the same as ever. The suburbs to the north and east had power, too. The blackout was contained to New York City and its seven million residents. 

Photo credit: Cuquita06051

Early the next morning, I reported to the UPI bureau in the Daily News building on East 42nd Street. The newsroom was in a state of what looked like a frenzy. It took a moment to realize it was actually under control. This was my first introduction to the  chaos of a newsroom during a big, breaking story. All hands on deck. There's nothing quite like it. Reporters - the good ones - thrive on the thrill of a big story. Since there was still no power, editors and reporters were phoning in their stories to the Washington, D.C. bureau.

The city editor Scott, my boss, turned his attention to me. 

"You have a car, right?" I had driven my VW Beetle from California when I moved to New York seeking work the previous April. 

I said yes.

"Here's what I need you to do," he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. "Head to the Bronx. Anywhere. We're hearing it's pretty bad up there. See what you see and call in. Call in often."

 He told me how to get to the Bronx, then a look of concern came over his face.

"You okay to do this?" he asked.

Was I okay? I was more than okay. I was pumped up. Two weeks into my first full-time reporting job and this was my first big story. A year ago, I was a summer fill-in at the Richmond (California) Independent, consigned to making daily calls to the police departments of the tiny suburban town of the East Bay and writing up three paragraphs on car break-ins and traffic accidents.  Scott counseled me to be careful. And then more people came up to me, telling me basically the same thing. They were worried. I wasn't. 

When I got to the Bronx, I passed a grocery store with its front windows bashed in. People were rushing in and out, carrying everything they could fit into their arms. Some pushed heavily laden shipping carts. Strangely, there was a kind of joy to it. People were smiling, laughing, helping themselves to whatever they could get to. It was like that everywhere I went. Stores and shops being happily raided by men, women and children. What few police I saw made no effort to intervene. There were just too many people. Buildings were set aflame. Sometimes there were firefighters on hand trying to extinguish them. Some fires just burned freely.

On the streets, people were celebrating and shouting, "It's Christmas in July!"

After I called in my account of what I'd witnessed, I was told to head to Brooklyn. To the Bushwick neighborhood where they'd been hearing things were totally out of control. I drove to Brooklyn. I parked near Broadway, the main street that had an elevated subway track running its length. Thousands of people were running around. I passed a small open lot where a man  had placed on display dozens of stolen shoes and was selling them. 

On Broadway, under the El, it was mayhem. People running every which way, entering and exiting the mutilated fronts of stores, carting away whatever they could hold onto. There were uniformed police officers, but I saw no one being arrested. I watched as some young men broke the lock on a metal security grate in front of a shop, pushed it up and went inside to go shopping. A burly cop in plain clothes brandished a pistol and followed them in. The young men came running out. The cop appeared moments later with a satisfied smirk on his face.

As I stood watching, jotting down notes in my notepad, I noticed a fireman high up on his fire engine's ladder lazily spraying water onto a burning building. He turned, saw me. Our eyes met. Then he pointed the fire hose at me and I was hit in the chest by a powerful blast of water. It knocked me to the ground. The fireman kept the hose on me and I was sent tumbling and skidding across asphalt littered with broken glass. Finally he either turned the hose away or I was far enough that its force  diminished. I got to my feet. My palms were bloodied by the shard of glass. I was soaked and furious. 

I called into the news room. Enraged, I started to tell how I'd been "mistaken for a looter." Whoever I was speaking to do was uninterested. What had I seen? Give me the story. I calmed down some and gave him my report. When I was done I was told to come back to the newsroom. 

Photo credit: Cuquita06051

That night power was finally restored. The blackout lasted a little more than 24 hours. More than 1,600 businesses were damaged or destroyed. Many were mom-and-pop stores. There were more than 1,000 fires. Close to 4,000 people were arrested.

 

"The blackout revealed how desperate the social and economic conditions had become in certain parts of the city, and there was actually some debate about whether the looting should be seen as criminality or as a misguided form of protest," said Jonathan Mahler, author of the book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, about New York in the summer of 1977. "Perversely, because the poorest neighborhoods were hit the hardest, many store owners lacked the means (or the insurance policies) to sustain the losses and damage. For many years after, Broadway, in Bushwick, was largely abandoned." 

Photo credit: Cuquita06051

New York City, already wounded by a severe financial crisis and riddled by crime, was shaken. There was a mayoral election that fall. One of the candidates sought to exploit what had happened during the blackout by decrying that the National Guard had not been called in. It fit neatly with his law-and-order platform that included favoring the restoration of capital punishment. It struck me as crass. But that candidate, Congressman Edward Koch, would go win the Democratic nomination and be elected mayor. 

The blackout was the biggest story of my young journalism career for less than three weeks. The first day of August, I was the only one on the local news desk from midnight to 8 a.m. The dreaded graveyard shift. In the middle of the night, the teletype machine connected to Police Headquarters clacked slowly. The machine would provide a few spare facts about a crime somewhere - e.g., 40 y o male shot DOA. Suspect arrested - and the precinct in which it happened. The protocol was to call NYPD Public Information to get further details. From a precinct deep in Brooklyn came news of a shooting. Two victims shot in a park. One dead. One wounded.

It was the final shooting by the mysterious gunman known as the Son of Sam.