It’s a New York story: growing up with friends in an apartment building.
That’s how it was for me. My best friend lived in 9B, we lived in 9A right next door. That is, until the family moved to the 3rd floor.
What a trauma. But we adjusted.
But even when she moved to 3B it seemed we were constantly in and out of eachother’s apartments. We baked together and put on shows. We loved to perform scenes from “Hair”, “Cabaret” and “Fidler on the Roof” lip synching and dancing our own original choreography for an audience of only parents.
When I was younger, we played endlessly with the kids in 8C. We ate with them, bathed with them, watched TV with them, even spent the Blackout of 1965 with them.
It was 5:28 PM on November 9 when the city went dark. My mother, sister and I were in 8C, our downstairs’ neighbors apartment. The fathers were at the office in mid-town and the women and children were on their own. Candles were lit and, after the initial panic, it was the adventure of a lifetime.
Dinner in the dark, spooky games, looking out the window and seeing an unilluminated city, staying up well past bedtime. Ah what a night that was.
Thanks for the memories. Like Tony, I was at the kitchen table, but having just gotten home an hour before from my three-subways-and-a-bus commute from my private school on the Upper West Side, I was sick of school and reading a comic book. All of sudden the room got completely dark. I was a tenth-grade hypochondriac and my first thought: “I’ve gone blind!”
I can’t remember if our power was on by the next morning, but I do remember driving all the way up Flatbush Avenue to the Manhattan Bridge as my father drove us to work and school. Drivers, including us, were picking up hitchhikers who gathered at bus stops (the same thing would happen in early January during the long transit strike), and ordinary people, not cops, were directing traffic at intersections with all the traffic lights out. Everyone seemed in a festive mood despite the hardships, though I am probably remembering it as better than it was.
I remember I was doing my homework at the kitchen table and I tore the page in my math workbook. I had to stand on a chair to get the scotch tape that my mother had “hidden” from the kids, and that’s where I was when the lights went out. Standing on a 1960s Herman Miller ripoff fiberglass kitchen chair in Woodside, Queens.