American Experience

KEVIN ZRALY

Imagine yourself on top of One World Trade Center, on the 107th floor. Windows On The World restaurant was one of the most magical places on earth, not just in New York City. On a clear day you could see 90 miles, planes flying below you.

And 9

30, anybody in the restaurant business will tell you, is crunch time. I was walking the floor and all of a sudden I look to my right, and Brooklyn is not there anymore. Okay, it's just, where did Brooklyn go? And then I quickly glance over, Queens is gone. It's blackout, there's no... no lights whatsoever. And as soon as I get up to the window and we're overlooking Manhattan, downtown Manhattan... (woosh) lights go out for us.

JACK FEINSTEIN

New York City is a vertical city. There are people in apartment houses that are ten stories high. They don't have any water, they have no lights. (sirens wailing) And there is a sense of urgency.

PATRICK MARSHALL

I stopped the car. And there was about 400 or 500 people in that park. And I told my partner, I says, "We're not going down there. Let's get out of here." (sirens wailing)

CHRISTOPHER VANAGER

It wasn't just nighttime. It was total darkness. Everybody was kind of moving in groups. I'm sure they were scared, too, you know, because you don't know who's coming at you. ERNESTO QUIONEZ: It was like things had reached this boiling point. Once the lights went out, all hell broke loose. (alarm bells and shouting)

JONATHAN MAHLER

It's like an orgy of violence, arson, and insanity. How do you explain that social phenomenon?

RADIO ANNOUNCERS

Hazy, hot and humid. High in the daytimes up near 100, overnight lows down to around 80. A lot of fingers crossed with the continued heat wave.

MARSHALL

July 13, 1977.

00-to-12

00 in a set of five. It was a beastly hot day. I distinctly remember it was horrifically hot.

MAHLER

The city's in the midst of a heat wave. Temperatures were routinely hitting 100, above 100.

Around 6

00, I headed home. I got home early enough that I got in the pool with the kids.

Somewhere around 8

00, it was clear that thunderstorms were going to move in, so we all got out.

RADIO ANNOUNCER

Severe thunderstorm warning in effect for all of Westchester County in New York. These storms can produce wind gusts 50 miles an hour and more, lightning, so be advised, whatever precautions seem advisable. (thunder)

DURKIN

My daughter was brushing her teeth and looked out the bathroom window and said, "What's wrong with the sky, Dad? It looks strange." I said, "Yeah, it's because of all the lightning. There's so much of it, it just stays lit." That evening, there was a lightning strike on a power line in Westchester County. The line went out and the demand starts to increase on some of the surrounding lines. This sort of essentially sets off a kind of chain reaction, a sort of a domino effect where another line suddenly has too much power, and it has to be shut down. (alarms and phones ringing) And then another line is overextended and it has to be shut down. Everyone's using a lot of power because they're all running air conditioners. And before you know it, the city is struggling to get enough power into the five boroughs.

I got a call maybe a little bit after 9

00 asking me to call the system operator. I called in and finally said, there's no other choice, the only alternative was to disconnect customers.

MAN ON PHONE

You know, you're gonna lose the whole thing. Tell him this is a dire emergency, if he can give us any more to give it to us.

OPERATOR

Right.

MAHLER

It is one man who is in charge of bringing all of this power in. You have people telling him, yelling at him, "You have to shut down some of these lines. You have to do it or the city's gonna lose power."

MAN ON PHONE

Bill, I hate to bother you, but you'd better shed about 400 megawatts of load or you're going to lose everything down there...

OPERATOR

Yeah, I... I'm trying to.

MAHLER

Anyone who's ever flown into New York City at night, who's ever been in New York City at night, there are lights everywhere. It's a beautiful image, really, in a way. It's the city that never sleeps, the city where the lights are always on. QUIONEZ: I was playing handball with my friends. And you can still play at night because there was a lot of lampposts around Jefferson Park. But then all of a sudden they started going out, one by one, like pop, pop, pop, and, uh, we're like, "Wow, what's happening?"

CARL ST. MARTIN

That night I'm on the third floor, windows open. It was very hot. So people were outside. And suddenly the TV went off. The light went off. All of a sudden, the noise outside in the street quickly stopped for a second, and suddenly you heard a (gasps) because everybody at the same time realized something had happened.

VINCENT DUNN

I was up in the office. I was catching up on some paperwork and having a cup of coffee and the lights dimmed. The emergency generator roared on and somebody shouted, "Blackout!" you know?

ZRALY

One of the things about Windows on the World right from the very beginning was its dress code. You had to have a jacket and tie. The general manager said to me, "You can tell people they can take their jackets off." Take their jackets off, you know, "Okay, you can take your jackets off." Next thing the ties are coming off. Next thing, you know, people loosening their shirts. The general manager got up and immediately spoke, "Ladies and gentlemen, everybody's getting champagne."