Today is the 30th anniversary of the Blackout of 1977. I emember it like it was yesterday. Except I wasn’t even in New York City. I was in Paris reading about it in the Herald Tribune.
I was on a two-month cycling trip through England and France with a friend. It was an amazing trip through gorgoues scenery. What an experience.
We’d finally made it to Paris and were living it up in a modest hotel near the Luxemborg Gardens. Food. Art. Walks around the city. It was my first time in Paris and I was enthralled.
But when word hit Paris of the Blackout, I felt conflicted, I felt split. I felt like I should be back home with my family and friends.
The pictures in the French newspapers of the city of my birth were frightening and strange: the city was exploding with looting and rage. It was a defining moment, something I wanted to witness for myself. There is something exciting about a crisis in New York; the way people come together and come apart.
I was a kid during the blackout of 1965. My sister, mother and were visiting friends in another apartment in our building when the lights went out. We waited with our mothers for the
fathers to walk home. The apartment lit by candle light was magic. As kids, it was a night of play in the darkness with an undercurrent of: Will everything be alright?
The City Room has amazing pictures of that day in 1977 when the lights went out and the city sunk into darkness and mayhem. Take a look. It will take you back to a completely different and time.
Thirty years ago tonight, the lights went out: building by building,
block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. Officially, the 1977
blackout lasted only 25 hours. But it left devastated neighborhoods and
hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. It quickly became a symbol
of New York’s malaise, arriving as it did when the city was just
starting to climb out of near-bankruptcy.
I also missed the more recent blackout a few summers ago. I was in a dentist’s office in Modesto having emergency root canal. The dental surgeon said: "Do you know what’s going on in New York City?"
My heart took a nose dive. This was just a couple of years after 9/11 and my thoughts went immediately to Ground Zero and the devestation of that day.
If you have recollections of the blackout of 1977, do tell. I will post them.
I remember the black out of 1977 no doubt July 13, 1977, it was a hot day close to 100 degrees i was 21 years old living with my parents, me and my brother had just came in the house from hanging out, i had brought my very first car an oldsmobile 98 regency 1977, living in Harlem we had came up stairs around something after 9pm, i went to my room to open the window i can see Yankee Stadium from afar off then all of a sudden the lights blinked then it went off and stayed off u can hear the people in the streets shouting black out black out, i was talking to my parents about the black out then me and my brother went back out side to see what was going on it was total madness on the streets, every one went buck wild tearing up stores pulling down gates throwing bottles, they didnt have no respect for people stores at all, we rode around for a little while then we saw enough we came back home and watch it from the window where it was safe, thats a black out that i will never forget, the 2003 black out was very mild, i went thur the 1965 black out also.
I was in my early 20s, coming home from my job as an evening manager of Bookmasters in Penn Station (or “Bookies” as my co-worker, artist David Wojnarowicz referred to it), and the F Train stopped, of all places, half-in and half-out of the Smith and 9th Street station. We passengers somehow made our way down from the elevated station tower in the dark in one piece, amazed at the new world that had just opened up to us..
I shlepped up 9th street to my apt at PPW and 8th Street ($125/month, utilities not included)and hung with my neighbors on the front stairs, illuminated by candles (and no doubt the lights of a thousand flickering bongs)…
Interesting, I didn’t have a car then, don’t think I had an AC, no computer, but my stereo and my little B&W TV (on which I watched the news and the Honeymooners and in a few short years, the drama of the John Lennon murder), so I was more oblivious to the technological deprivations then than I would be now… it was darkness, uncertainty but still community..
The next day I remember seeing my sister and late-brother in law who lived on Berkeley and 7th, and we made our way to the Coach Inn I think on Garfield and 7th where we sat at the bar with the door opened (no A-C) drinking cool (maybe room temperature) draft beer as the stifling heat, chaos and violence which did not seem to touch our little corner of the world at that time, unfolded, before any of us had kids, or careers, before the Slope became the mighty economic engine that it is today,and we sat and sipped and laughed and gazed into the distance at this glimpse of apocalypse and our own unknown futures and the sheer wonder of it all…
Speak memory
On 72nd Street near Broadway a guy snatched a purse, somebody yelled ‘get him,’ and something like 20 people took chase. A minute later he was trapped, backed into a doorway near West End Avenue. He was this little twitchy guy, kept his head down, held the purse out in front of him like an offering. The guys in the front of the crowd took the purse, yelled at him for a while, then let him go. Lucky him. That was all the crime that I know about on 72nd Street that night, but on 34th Street the next day a guy I worked with said he could sell me a pair of Puma’s for five bucks. He lived in the Bronx. It was a good deal but I didn’t take him up on it.
Still have in my possession a magazine called “Blackout ’77: A Night to Remember – The Official U.S. Collector’s Edition.” Cover price $1.50. Don’t know who collects blackout magazines, but it’s definitely a keeper.
I was in the hospital with my grandmother as she died. Her death wasn’t related to the blackout, but in a way it seemed fitting that the lights went out and she passed.
I was in the hospital with my grandmother as she died. Her death wasn’t related to the blackout, but in a way it seemed fitting that the lights went out and she passed.
1977 Blackout: I was home on West 65th Street in Manhattan, probably practicing my alto saxophone. I definitely remember playing after the lights went out. Perhaps I just continued, or else I decided to play to serenade the darkness. Then I went out to look around. Our super had set himself up in a chair in front of the building with a bottle of liquor. I walked to the busy intersection of 65th, Broadway, Columbus Avenue – lots of people, cars, and someone trying to direct traffic. Everything seemed kind of festive. Next morning, I walked to my summer job in Midtown and was surprised by all the broken glass in the streets. A few weeks later, I bought a great pro clarinet for very cheap on consignment (from Paul Jefferies, who was Thelonius Monk’s tenorman at the time) – I always wondered if it was a hot item snatched during the blackout. Around 1984 it was stolen from my apartment.
I was at Frieda’s house in Whitestone that evening with 6 friends all from the HS of Art & Design. Some of us drove while the rest took the subway over to her place for a midsummer dinner. We were playing frisbee in the street. The street lights our illumination. Someone threw the frisbee and it slipped under a car. At that very instant the street lights went out. It took a moment as we all stood there wondering what just occurred. We just figured the lights above had short circuited. As we walked back to the house we realized there had a been a black out and we were staying the night. Traffic lights and the subways were not working, which was our only concern. We had a great time together. The only other time I had been in a blackout in NY was the one in ’65 you mention. My mom was reassuring me that my father would be coming home from Manhattan. I knew the trains weren’t working and was concerned about him getting home safely in the dark. The last big black out post 9/11 and that was the scariest of them all.