Soon anxiety gave way to drinking gradually warming beer, to idling in stand-still traffic and enduring steadily rising temperatures. The news that it was all a massive technical malfunction, not an enemy attack, kept tempers cool as we faced the largest power outage in our history, an episode that affected 50 million people from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and south to Ohio.
The gas lines were long and the water scares real, but essentially the Blackout of 2003 was a genteel affair. Reporters looking for a repeat of the 1977 blackout converged on Harlem only to be disappointed. A police officer laughed at the journalists. The city burned in the old days, he said, but “it’s a different time and a different place.”
Yes, thankfully, it is. “I was walking around Chelsea about 9 p.m. and I heard bagpipes,” says Matthew Kelty, 33, of Manhattan. “I walked toward the sound and ran into a firehouse. One of the firemen was playing them. Everyone just followed the music. There were dozens of people doing little jigs in the half darkness. They were making up dances as they went.” And so in the darkness, there was a kind of American light - and in the summer heat, warmth.
