This is the first part in a five-day series marking the 30th anniversary of New York City’s disastrous summer of 1977.
It wasn’t the darkness – it was the despair.
How else could historians explain why a power outage – small by modern standards – became a seminal moment in New York history, the kind of where-were-you-when event that inspires passionate storytelling like 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination?
When people talk about the night the lights went out, they invariably are speaking about the July 13-14, 1977, blackout, even though the ones that came before or since were larger in scale.
This event – marked by looting and the flames of arson and unrest – defined New York for a generation and plunged the city that never sleeps into the darkest of nights.
“The whole era was a long low point in the city’s life, and this was the absolute nadir,” said Jonathan Mahler, author of the book “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning.”
Indeed, darkness had hit the city long before the power went out. New York was well into the throes of a financial crisis. Morale was low within city agencies, where layoffs – including at the NYPD – kept mounting.
Basic city services were neglected or ignored. Unemployment was rising faster than the sweltering July temperatures. Gas prices were out of control. Racial tensions were bubbling under the surface. And the beloved Yankees – usually an escapist oasis – hadn’t won a World Series in almost 13 years.
As if all that weren’t enough, the “Son of Sam” was running loose on the streets, shooting his victims with a .44-caliber cannon.
The floodgates were opened by a series of lightning strikes. The first blasted a power line in Westchester, knocking out the Indian Point generating station that fed much of New York City.
Subsequent strikes shut down additional facilities, and within minutes, all five boroughs and parts of Westchester were plunged into historic darkness.
Times Square was as dark as a narrow tunnel. Lovers holding hands could not see each other’s faces. Nothing powered by a wire worked unless it was plugged into a generator. Headlights were all that kept the avenues from total darkness.
A stunned cargo pilot radioed to an air-traffic controller that the runway lights had disappeared.
“Where’s Kennedy Airport?” he asked. He was sent to Philadelphia.
In bedrooms, clocks went out at 9:34 p.m. – the official time of the blackout. Minutes later, all hell broke loose.
Suddenly, looters hit the streets like an advancing army, taking everything that wasn’t nailed down, unless they could get the nails, too. Lightning striking was opportunity knocking, or, as one looter put it: “It’s Christmastime! It’s Christmastime!”
So what if you had to rip down a gate or break a store window? What looters couldn’t cart by themselves, they got friends or strangers to help carry. What they couldn’t use, they could sell. What they couldn’t sell or use, well, they could just give away.
In one Bronx dealership, thieves drove off with 50 cars valued at about $200,000. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, cops caught one man with 300 sink stoppers and another with a case of clothespins.
The streets got so bad that soon, even the looters were being mugged.
In some neighborhoods, the police were powerless. Layoffs from two years earlier had already left the department depleted, and low morale kept many from answering the emergency call to arms.
Many of those who did answer were deployed in the wrong areas, leaving neighborhoods like Bushwick defenseless.
Cops did manage to lock up more than 3,700 looters, the largest mass arrest in city history. Processing them and storing the stolen property – which included washing machines and sofa beds – was another challenge.
While the cops dealt with the looters, firefighters were kept busy by arsonists. More than 1,000 fires broke out.
On top of that, there were 1,700 false alarms. When firefighters responded, many of them were pelted with rocks.
“You could smell smoke for weeks after the blackout,” Mahler said.
Property-damage estimates ranged from $150 million to $300 million.
For a mayor struggling in his re-election campaign, the timing could not have been worse.
At first, Abe Beame thought that a fuse had blown in the Bronx synagogue where he was giving a campaign speech.
“See,” Beame said, joking about the crisis that would ultimately define his administration. “This is what you get for not paying your bills.”
Months later, Beame paid the ultimate political price, losing his re-election bid when he finished third in the Democratic primary behind Ed Koch.
Fear continued to grip the city as residents faced another night without power. Not until 10:39 p.m. on July 14 – more than 25 hours after the blackout started – did the lights come back on.
And years would pass before the darkness faded.
But fade it did. A new administration moved into City Hall. Fiscal stability returned. Even the dysfunctional Yankees went on to win the World Series in ’77 and ’78.
“The city did recover and find a way forward,” Mahler said. “That’s what’s so remarkable about New York.”