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Thirty years ago tonight, New York City lost electricity when a Con Ed substation was hit by lightning strikes and a "cascading effect" caused the system to shut down around 9PM. And NYC, as well as parts of Westchester County, were powerless for over a day in the sweltering heart of the summer. Subways were stuck, mobs set fires and stores were looted.
It was also the summer that other dramas gripped the city - the Yankees, the Son of Sam, and the mayoral race, or really the Democratic primary race between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo. Here's a round-up of 1977 Blackout coverage:
- The Daily News' special The Bronx is Burning section
- CityRoom's blackout commemoration, including Joyce Purnick's memory of covering the blackout from Mayor Abe Beame's command center
- A slideshow of photographs on Wired
- Post's 1977-related articles, plus this "Blackout by the Numbers" graphic and a column by Ed Koch about the summer of 1977
- The Blackout History Project, which offers highlights of coverage and a timeline of power outage events between 1950 and 1979
- Post's 1977-related articles, plus this "Blackout by the Numbers" graphic and a column by Ed Koch about the summer of 1977
- An 2002 NPR Weekend Edition piece about the blackout (on its 25th anniversary)
- And the Wikipedia entry on the 1977 blackout
And we thought this 1997 CNN piece was prescient:
"If the same kind of stuff were to happen today, I think it would be seen as isolated events. What was different 20 years ago was this tremendous culture of city-hate and self-hate that just permeated the air," said Marshall Berman, a political science professor at City University of New York.Do you remember the 1977 blackout? Or maybe you're just glad you didn't have to live through that 1977 blackout. The 2003 blackout wasn't too bad, but last year's lingering Queens blackout is another story.Could a massive blackout hit New York again? Officials aren't making promises. "We have a saying in this business," Charlie Durkin of Con Edison says. "We never say never."
If the city went dark again, most New Yorkers believe a disaster on the scale of 1977 would not be repeated. Twenty years later, New Yorkers might find themselves in the dark, but not necessarily in despair.
Photographs of the 1977 downtown skyline (the lights are from emergency generators) by the AP
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The 2003 blackout was uncomfortable and inconvenient but not scary at all.
How about some coverage of Hillary Clinton and her conspiring with John Edwards to keep candidates out of the fall debates?
Democrats stiflng democracy? The horror.
I remember the 77 blackout because it really was a sweltering hot day and night.
Carvel gave out free ice cream, people were coming out of there with gallons of ice cream.
I picked up their flying saucers. 77 was a great year. that's when a nickle bag was really 5 dollars.
I remember the '77 blackout. I had come home from an after-work French class and was putting the finishing touches on dinner when the lights went out. My partner and I had a lovely candle-lit meal and then adjourned to bed. It would have been a lovely romantic evening if the weather had been less hot and steamy!
The next day, he walked to his office and I phoned in. The office manager (who had walked to the office herself) said all our clients were closed and evenyone had the day off. I ventured out in a vain search for somewhere cool. All was tranquil in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, and once the power came back I was surprised to see the newsreels of civil disorder elsewhere in town.
I was just a small child at the time, but I do remember my mom taking me out in Brooklyn Heights where we lived and everything seemed normal, just the typical humid summer day. It wasn't until a few years later that I heard about what happened elsewhere in the city during that blackout.
I know the lights on the bottom picture are from generators, on the top picture, the black and white one there is one building that seems all lit up. It's far to the left, near the Battery, probably along Water or South Street.
Anyone know what that is?
I remember the blackout. I had just finished 2nd grade and lived in Ditmas Park. I remember the lights suddenly went off then briefly on (and you heard hurrahs) and then finally off. And I remember the warnings on the radio (1010 WINS seared in the brain) about staying indoors because of the looting. That freaked me out as much as the warnings about staying away from windows at night while the Son of Sam was loose.
I was a teenager living in suburbia. I watched the Channel 5 news every night - it just seemed natural that New York City was going to hell in a handbasket. But that didn't stop us from going to Yankee games or visiting the Village to buy weed and records. Summer of '77 we also went to MSG three times to see Pink Floyd, ELP and Yes. We would board the Metro North and take seats in the smoking car for the two hour ride. In Manhattan we'd head down to 6th Ave. in the Village for beers (Watneys) at the English Pub. The drinking age was 18 then. If you behaved yourself, the bartenders could care less if you were under age.
Yeah, NYC was a slimy, dirty, loud, smelly, obnoxious place with potential violence lurking everywhere - but that was The City in 1977.
It was a hot night and I remember the lights went out right during Charlie's Angels. I lived in the Bronx near Fordham Road and all we heard throughout the night were police sirens and plate glass windows being smashed. I'll never forget the supermarket that got totally cleaned out.
Wow, nice to see so many peoples' memories of this event. Very cool to read what everyone shared so thanks for sharing. Glad to see Gothamist cover this historic event.
Great to read everyone's memories of this event. Thanks for sharing. Glad to see Gothamist cover this (and other) events in NYC's history.