July 13, 1977, 40 years ago: New York City gets hit with a blackout, and all hell breaks loose.
A lightning strike at a power station along the Hudson River overloaded New York City's electrical grid, and forced Consolidated Edison, New York City's electric company (a.k.a. Con Edison or Con Ed) to shut down all power, since losing it temporarily was better than increasing the damage and losing it for the long term.
I was 7 years old, and living in East Brunswick, New Jersey, watching TV with my parents. We were watching Susan and Sam, a pilot that NBC didn't pick up, on WNBC-Channel 4. ABC was airing the Robert Blake private detective series Baretta. CBS was airing a movie, Made for Each Other, from 1971, written by and starring real-life married couple Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna.
I remember nothing about Susan and Sam other than the title. Looking up the TV grid for that night, the description is as follows: "A pair of reporters are lovers until competition on the job starts to get rough." The stars were Robert Foxworth, later of Falcon Crest, and Christine Belford, who never became a star -- but not only grew up in Amityville, Long Island, New York, but for 5 years lived in the actual house that The Amityville Horror was based on.
I figure we must have been watching Donnie and Marie on ABC at 8:00, since the Osmond siblings' guests were Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and my mother was a huge fan of the King and Queen of the West. But she hated Baretta, mainly because she hated Blake, even though they both once lived in Nutley, New Jersey. (So did Martha Stewart, and the joke is that the wrong one went to prison.)
So, at 9:00, seeing that her options were Baretta, Made for Each Other and CPO Sharkey, starring Don Rickles on a naval base, and she hated Rickles, too, my mother stopped watching TV for the night. But my father liked Rickles, so we watched that until 9:30. Then came Susan and Sam. Although the still-ongoing story of the New York serial killer known as the Son of Sam was freaking me out (me and lots of other people), at the time, I didn't make any connection between him and the title of the show. Nor did my father. So, at 9:30, we started watching.
And then, at 9:37... the TV went out. Dad got up to change the channel, and got nothing. WCBS-Channel 2 had their transmitting tower at the Empire State Building. Every other station used the one at the World Trade Center. And both transmitters were out.
The original World Trade Center, with backup generators
lighting the roofs. In the distance, New Jersey is still lit up.
We called my grandmother, who lived in Brick, near the Jersey Shore. She and my grandfather were about equidistant from New York and Philadelphia, and able to get both cities' stations clearly, whereas we could get a little bit of a signal from WPVI-Channel 6, the ABC affiliate, if we fiddled with our TV set's antenna, but that was it for the Philly stations. At her house, the Philly stations were still coming in fine, but they were broadcasting as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
This was before 24-hour news channels, let alone social media. We were forced to guess what had happened. Since none of the Philly stations were breaking into a Special Report, we knew it wasn't something horrible, like a nuclear strike or a natural disaster. (Well, it was a natural phenomenon that caused the technical mishap, but neither was a disaster.)
Finally, Dad went old-school, and turned on the radio, and that's how we found out about the blackout: He turned the dial until he got a station broadcasting from somewhere in New Jersey, probably from Newark. Unlike "The Night the Lights Went Out" in 1965, and the later blackout of 2003, New Jersey's electricity wasn't affected at all.
Channel 4 got their backup generator running, and got back on the air in 25 minutes. Channel 2 took an hour and 28 minutes to do so. The other stations -- WNEW-Channel 5, WABC-Channel 7, WOR-Channel 9, WPIX-Channel 11, WNET-Channel 13, and the various UHF stations -- were out for an entire day.
As it turned out, there were a few buildings in The City whose owners had learned from the '65 blackout, and installed private generators. The Pratt Institute, which teaches electrical work, had generators for that purpose at their campus in Downtown Brooklyn, and they came in handy. And the Rockaways, across Jamaica Bay from John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, were in The City, but were nonetheless served not by Con Ed, but by the Long Island Lighting Company, or LILCO.
(LILCO's mishandling of restoration after Hurricane Gloria in 1985 led to calls for its replacement. It took until 1998 for it to be replaced by the Long Island Power Authority, or LIPA. In 2014, Long Island's power was handed over to Public Service Enterprise Group, PSEG, the successor to North Jersey's company, Public Service Electric & Gas, or PSE&G, which ran our electricity in 1977, and was unaffected.)
But nearly all of New York City was out. That included traffic lights. And the Subway system. And Shea Stadium, where the New York Mets were playing the Chicago Cubs. It was the bottom of the 6th inning, the Mets trailed 2-1, and 3rd baseman Lenny Randle was at bat, when the power went out. Shea's backup generators kicked in, allowing people to leave safely, but the game had to be suspended.
Not a good night on which to
"bring your kiddies and bring your wife."
In the 1965 blackout, power went out at 5:27 PM, at the height of the evening rush hour. In the 2003 blackout, it was around 4:00 in the afternoon, which messed things up for rush hour. This time, 9:37 was well past rush hour, so that wasn't a problem -- although if you were on the road, for example one of the people at Shea that night, including 14,626 paying customers, it was still difficult.
After the '65 blackout, the New York Police Department said that The City had the fewest reported crimes of any night since records began to be kept, breaking the record of February 9, 1964, the night The Beatles made their 1st appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
That would not be the case on July 13, 1977. Increasing crime was already an issue in '65, but it had gotten considerably worse by '77. The City's finances were still in their comeback from nearly defaulting 2 years earlier. The NYPD was seriously understaffed. They were also still chasing the Son of Sam, who had already shot 11 people, killing 5 of them, in 7 separate incidents.
Two of those incidents were in The Bronx, near Pelham Bay Park, and people in that area began patrolling the streets with bats, pipes, and whatever other blunt instruments they could get their hands on, for fear of the Son of Sam taking advantage of the blackout to strike again.
The City was also in a nasty heat wave, topping out at 104 degrees on July 6. So, between the poverty, the heat, the crime, and the anger at the system, nerves were on edge. And once The City's poor people realized that the blackout meant that security systems wouldn't work, they began smashing store windows and taking what they wanted.
It was a horrible mess. The NYPD later said it was the most arrests the NYPD ever made in 1 night: 3,776. Let me type that out: Three thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six people were arrested. I can't find a record of how many of them were ever convicted and imprisoned. But from 9:37 PM to sunrise at 5:39 AM, 8 hours, it works out to about 481 arrests an hour, or 8 arrests per minute. It works out to about 1 out of every 2,000 people living in The City at the time being arrested that night.
Incredibly, there was only one murder in The City that night: Dominick Ciscone, 19, in front of his apartment building in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The killer was never caught. And it had nothing to do with either the rioting or the Son of Sam.
Other than that, nobody died -- not by the hand of a rioter, not by the hand of a policeman, not by the hand of a civilian vigilante, not in any of the fires that were started that night, not even in an accident. Aside from Ciscone, the only people who died in New York City that night were from illnesses.
The Sun came up, and people could see the messes the rioters left behind. But it didn't stop. A Pontiac dealership in The Bronx reported 50 of their new cars being stolen. Geraldo Rivera, then a young reporter for ABC News, did a report from Broadway -- not "The Great White Way" in Manhattan, but the one in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. While the camera was rolling and he was giving his report, the window of the store behind him was shattered -- from the inside. And 2 men jumped through it, apparently not caring about being cut by broken glass. Rivera didn't even flinch: He just continued his report.
The most-remembered photo from the looting,
under the elevated tracks of the Broadway Line in Brooklyn,
now the J, M and Z Trains.
Con Ed got Staten Island and Queens their power back by 1:45 PM on July 14, but it took until 10:39 PM to get the entire City fully operational again. The 1965 and 2003 blackouts were more widespread, but the former was merely a one night's inconvenience, and the latter little more than an annoyance. The 1977 blackout was an absolute debacle, all by itself, before even considering the unrest that followed.
The Son of Sam struck once more, in Brooklyn on July 31. But he parked his car too close to a fire hydrant, and the ticket he got was traced. David Berkowitz, a mailman living in adjoining Yonkers with a Bronx mail route, was arrested on August 10, and pled guilty. New Yorkers calmed down, and turned their attention back to more pleasurable pursuits, such as the disco dancing craze, and the Yankees' run for another title.
But there was an election for Mayor on, and once TV service was restored, people saw the film of the rioters, and that killed the hopes of the incumbent, Abe Beame. The fact that the rioters were mostly black killed those of Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton. The fact that he was also a minority killed those of Herman Badillo of The Bronx, the 1st Congressman of Puerto Rican descent. And the fact that she seemed to be soft on crime killed those of former Congresswoman Bella Abzug.
So the race came down to the Secretary of State of the State of New York, a former crusading lawyer from Queens, Mario Cuomo; and Manhattan-based Congressman Ed Koch. And Koch positioned himself as the tough guy on crime, demanding a return to the death penalty. The Mayor of New York has no say in that: It's the State legislature and the Governor. But he used the crime issue to beat Cuomo -- who nonetheless got elected Lieutenant Governor the next year, and Governor 4 years after that, and his rivalry with Koch continued until Koch was beaten in 1989.
Con Ed, the NYPD, and the City as a whole all learned their lessons from the '77 sizzle. The August 14, 2003 outage has been the only one in New York since, and it was handled well. Social media allowed police and civilians alike to communicate better. Some people even used their cell phones as flashlights to help each other out. There was no violence, and crime was minimal.
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