on July 13, 1977, a pair of lightning strikes in Westchester County knocked out the main transmission lines from the Indian Point nuclear plant, leaving New York City’s power grid dangerously overloaded. Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times/Reduxīetween 8:37 and 8:56 p.m. Generations of the Casuso family have endured urban blight and change as they continue to call the neighborhood their home.
Looters and residents of the Bushwick neighborhood run down Broadway during the blackout in New York, July 14, 1977. But while it was undoubtedly a formative moment for both Bushwick and the city as a whole - in ways both good and bad - the reality of the night the lights went out, according to those who were there, was far more complicated than the legend would have it. So when Bushwick residents ended up on the front page of the New York Times hauling furniture and mattresses down the street in the shadow of the elevated J train tracks, it became an enduring image of the apocalypse that New York only narrowly avoided. Bush defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who warned that bailing out New York would be “a disaster.”) On the radio at the time, you could hear Billy Joel’s “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway),” in which the Long Islander dreamed of a future, four decades hence, when the whole of New York City would be condemned and abandoned. (Ford had been advised in this matter by his chief of staff, none other than future George W. An appeal to the federal government had met with outright refusal from President Gerald Ford, who disparaged the city’s debt woes as an “insidious disease,” prompting the Daily News’s famous “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline. In 1975, after City Hall had resorted to accounting tricks to pay for social services amid the shortfall in tax receipts that followed white flight to the suburbs, New York had found itself with no one willing to buy its bonds, leaving the city on the brink of bankruptcy.
The central lesson of the 1977 blackout, it seems, has been fear: of violence, of anarchy, of an untamed city that would consume itself without a firm hand of law and order at the tiller. Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel City on Fire made the blackout its centerpiece, with a pair of children abandoned on the Manhattan streets at a time “when everything seemed on the edge of becoming something else.” Jonathan Mahler, in his decline-porn epic Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, devoted his chapter on the blackout to NYPD officers scrambling to rein in looters in a district the police viewed as “a cross between a foreign legion outpost and a leper colony.” In Summer of Sam, it was the occasion for Spike Lee himself to play a WABC-TV reporter in Harlem declaring that people are “going crazy,” to swelling music and the sound of breaking glass. The blackout that hit New York City on July 13, 1977, has achieved legendary status as a cautionary tale.
“Then we were like, ‘Oh, this doesn’t sound like too much fun anymore.’ ” It wasn’t until later, she said, that she heard about the looting that had begun on nearby Broadway. I know everyone in my family is going to get home as quickly as possible.’ ” The lights went out, and at that point I said, ‘Oh, shit. “I was at home with my boyfriend, alone, so probably doing lots of things I should not have been doing. “I had just graduated from high school,” remembers the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation director, at the time a seventeen-year-old living in Bushwick. Michelle Neugebauer remembers exactly where she was when the lights went out. The photo was taken from Jersey City, New Jersey. At dawn, the Manhattan skyline shows no lights due to a power blackout, New York, New York, July 14, 1977.
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