Good morning. It's Tuesday. We'll look back at one of the defining moments in the city's psyche that began 45 years ago tonight — the 1977 blackout. |
 | | D. Gorton/The New York Times |
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By the time the lights went out that steamy night, "New York had reached an arson-scarred, drug-infested, economically challenged nadir," the journalist Martin Gottlieb later wrote. The city was struggling to cope with the lingering municipal financial crisis and the serial killer known as the Son of Sam, who was still on the loose. The blackout touched off rioting and looting that wrecked neighborhoods from Bushwick to East Harlem. |
I asked Jonathan Mahler — who described the summer of 1977 in the best-selling book "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning" and who is now a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine — to talk about what the 1977 blackout meant for the city then, and what it means now. |
For people who weren't around for the blackout, put it in context: How bad was it? |
I won't go into all of the details of what caused the blackout, but the short version is that lightning struck a substation in a small town upstate that fed power into the city at around 9:30 at night. |
Within minutes of the city losing power, looters started flooding into the streets, smashing windows and taking whatever they could grab. The looting was everywhere, but it was most heavily concentrated in poor neighborhoods. For my book, I focused mainly on the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, whose main commercial strip, Broadway, was completely overrun with looters. People were literally throwing garbage cans through windows, sawing open padlocks and using crowbars to pry open steep shutters. |
The bulk of the looting had ended by daybreak, but the power didn't come back on until the following night, almost 25 hours after it went out. |
How did the blackout change the way New Yorkers saw the city? Was the overriding message one of fear — fear of violence? Fear that the city was not only ungovernable (as former Mayor John Lindsay said) but also uncontrollable? |
Twelve years earlier, New York had a citywide blackout and nothing at all had happened. So, clearly, the diametrically different reaction to the '77 blackout suggested that the city was now a very different, far more out-of-control place. Of course, many New Yorkers in more affluent neighborhoods went to bed that night having no idea what was happening across their city. It wasn't until they saw the headlines the following day that they were confronted with the shocking news. |
As it happened, the city was in the midst of a mayoral race at the time. Ed Koch, a long-shot candidate and longtime progressive, capitalized on the fear and outrage spreading across the city to refashion himself into the law-and-order candidate. It's entirely possible that without the blackout, he never would have been elected mayor. |
Didn't the city tell cops to report to the nearest station house, not the one they were assigned to? |
Yes, after the lights went out, the order went out that officers should respond to the nearest precinct. Of course, many cops lived outside the city, in New Jersey, Westchester or Long Island, and so the nearest precincts were not in central Brooklyn or the South Bronx or other neighborhoods where the looting was especially rampant. |
It's also worth noting that at the time, the city was just a few years removed from its infamous brush with bankruptcy, and budget cuts had forced massive layoffs across the N.Y.P.D., so not only were their numbers depleted but morale in the department was low. In some cases, the whole criminal-justice apparatus was just completely overmatched by the sheer number of looters. Many of the cops I interviewed in Bushwick told me wild and disturbing stories about stuffing looters into the trunks of patrol cars, and handcuffing them to radiators and tables in the overcrowded station house. |
Did the blackout point the way to where we are now? In 1977, New York was still struggling to put the fiscal crisis in the past. Now New York is struggling to put a different crisis in the past, but one that has created a tremendous economic burden. |
Well, I'd say yes and no. I think the blackout revealed how desperate the social and economic conditions had become in certain parts of the city, and there was actually some debate about whether the looting should be seen as criminality or as a misguided form of protest. And perversely, because the poorest neighborhoods were hit the hardest, many store owners lacked the means (or insurance policies) to enable them to sustain the losses and damage. For many years after, Broadway, in Bushwick, was largely abandoned. |
The pandemic, similarly, hit the city's poor neighborhoods the hardest, but New York is a much different city now. In 1977, its economy was still reeling from the loss of manufacturing jobs. But it has since become a thriving center of global finance, and it would seem to be in a much better position to manage the burden. |
It's a mostly sunny day with temperatures near 90. At night, prepare for a chance of showers and thunderstorms and temps in the low 70s. |
In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption). |
 | | Gabby Jones for The New York Times |
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Still blaming the Bloody Mary |
 | | The New York Times |
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I was a copy person on the night shift at The New York Times in the summer of 1977. My day began at 7:15 p.m. in a newsroom with gunmetal desks, rotary-dial telephones and manual typewriters. "Dinner" was a 45-minute break that came early. The pint-size tyrant who was our boss wanted us back before the presses started at 9:30 p.m. |
So at 8 p.m., I went down the back steps with a co-worker — who says she was wearing a Diane von Furstenberg dress — and across the street to a bar, where something happened that happened only when I went to a bar with her: The bartender topped off our drinks. And then he topped them off again. |
Back at the office, the editors were caught up in the usual last-minute frenzy. And then, for a too-long moment, the industrial-strength fluorescent lights of the newsroom fluttered. I walked over to the co-worker in the Diane von Furstenberg dress and said something like, "Did he make my Bloody Mary too strong, or are the lights flickering?" |
The newsroom went dark before she could answer. |
What followed was a scramble: a scramble to figure out how to publish the next morning's paper, a scramble to find reporters to write the stories, a scramble to find candles by which they could do their work. I was given an assignment — an assignment! I was told to walk toward Grand Central Terminal and interview people about — well, anything: where they would spend the night if there was no 9:32 to take them home, or what they remembered of the last big blackout, 12 years before. |
Eventually I called the office and dictated the quotes to someone who passed them along to the reporters writing the stories our readers would read if The Times managed to publish a paper. (It did, using presses in New Jersey, where the power was on.) |
My girlfriend and I had developed a pastime of trying new pizza places and learning all about pizza. |
She was from Brooklyn, and one summer weekend she took me to a pizzeria deep in the borough where she had gone as a child. It sold pizza and ice cream from a window to customers who sat at picnic tables in a patio area. |
We went to the window to order. Looking past the cashier, we could see large, thin, circular pies, and smaller, thicker, rectangular ones. |
"Are those Grandma slices?" my girlfriend asked. |
The man at the counter wasn't too interested in answering questions. |
"We have the round kind, and the square kind," he said. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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