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, then 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." (CBS News theme music playing)

RADIO ANNOUNCER

Now direct from CBS News. This special radio net alert news report.

ANNOUNCER

A major power blackout has hit New York City and surrounding communities.

RADIO HOST

Chuck, if you could, what can you tell us about the feel for Midtown Manhattan?

REPORTER

Well, George, there are people directing traffic at the intersections. I assume many of them are policemen. Some of them, obviously, are just volunteers, people who wanted to pitch in. But in general people are taking it in good spirit, and almost a little conviviality going on. Where were you when the lights went out?

MAN

Radio City Music Hall.

REPORTER

What happened in the music hall? All of sudden the lights went out. No picture, no sound, nothing. And a man made an announcement about, uh, the power is off in the whole city. And you're waiting for the subway now? No, there's no subway running. So what are you doing here? I'm on TV. (people laughing)

FEMALE REPORTER

All I can tell you is there were severe electrical storms to the north. Lights totally went out about 15 minutes ago.

MALE REPORTER

All five boroughs are affected so that's the word. Seven million people are now without power.

JOYCE PURNICK

My beat at the Post was covering politics. I went running over to City Hall and I spent the night in the command center where we got regular briefings on what they said was going on in the city. The blackout was not the city's fault, but, um, it was an opportunity for the mayor, Abe Beame, to show the people of New York that he was in control. What are you doing now that this is happening? We are trying to keep on top through every agency in the city to do everything possible to keep things moving, and keep people alerted and have people who are with city agencies at their stations in case they are needed.

PURNICK

I'm not sure to this day if he, or even the police commissioner, actually knew what was going on, because if they did, they didn't tell us.

VINCENT DUNN

I'm trying to scramble to find out what the big issues are. I called up the fire battalions, seeing how things are in their districts. The phones were evidently working. And I told them, "Hey, we gotta go down to the subways, "make sure those people stuck in those hot trains don't bail out on those third-rail tracks." And then we have these portable generators that are useful. You know, hospitals, that's our first priority.

RADIO REPORTER

At Bellevue, the city's largest hospital, emergency generator service has been halted by an electrical fire. Steps are being taken to protect the lives of patients on respirators and other necessary electrical equipment. Dr. Stephen Schwartz at New York's Lenox Hospital says emergency equipment is working there, but they are bracing for a possible flood of patients.

DUNN

Then, you know, I got called to go respond to a fire. And I never returned to the firehouse. I knew this was going to be a very difficult and challenging task to put the power system back together. It's really not made to shut down and restart. It's made to stay in service.

FEINSTEIN

We knew this was gonna be a long, drawn-out affair. The restoration plan was out of date because it hadn't been updated since 1965, so between Charlie and I, we made up the plan.

DURKIN

Well, there's only two ways to restore the power. One is to bootstrap the system up on its own, or to bring power in from the outside. We both knew that the quickest, fastest way was get power in from the outside. I said, "I'll take a part from the north. "Jack, you take the part from the Long Island Lighting, and at some point we're gonna meet in the middle."

RADIO REPORTER

Insofar as police are concerned, all off-duty police officers are being ordered to their nearest precinct-- not the precinct where they work, but the precinct of residence.

MARSHALL

We didn't know it was a big blackout. The lights went out, but who knew if the lights were gonna stay out? There was no AM/FM radios in the patrol cars at the time. So you had no radio communication with the outside. Our portable radio had died because of the repeaters being out. Well, we go back into the station house, and when we went into the station house, that's when we really knew that the pot was cooking. The station house was in darkness, complete and utter darkness. Everybody's walking around with flashlights, some candles. and it looked like a cross between a Boris Karloff movie and Car 54. The sergeant said, "Go out, do the best you can, "come back in a little while. "We're gonna have a better plan in place. But go out and do what you can do."

JOSHUA FREEMAN

12 years earlier, November 1965, New York City lost its power and it was a very startling event. But all in all, the city handled it remarkably well. You know, the urban legend was that nine months later births spiked in the city. I don't know if that's actually true but I think that captivated the sense that most people had of almost a kind of moment out of the ordinary but not a scary or threatening experience.

PURNICK

I remember the blackout of '65 as almost being fun. There was a certain festive atmosphere. People pulled together. There were little get-togethers on the streets.

ELZORA WILLIAMSON

Had a bright moon. Everything was peaceful. We were directing traffic, and then we had everybody else start directing traffic with us. People became helpful to each other, and it went very, very smoothly.

The blackout in 1965 happened at 5

30. So the storeowners were still in their stores locking up. The temperature was between 43 and 48 degrees, right, so people were not out on the street.

FREEMAN

A lot of people simply stayed in their houses. There was no real sense of panic. There was no increase in crime. In the end, really no big deal.

MAHLER

New York had been this great kind of working-class city. You could come to New York, immigrants, obviously, from around the world, you could find a job, you could make a better life.

FREEMAN

Through the mid-1960s, New York was doing pretty well economically. It was both a financial center, it was a huge manufacturing center. You'd see blue-collar workers all over the place. You would see factories making garments, making electronic goods, you'd see people working unloading ships on the docks.

MAHLER

New York was historically a city that did take care of people, where the subways were heavily subsidized, where you had great public schools, where you had this fantastic network of universities that were free. And by 1977, I mean all of this was just such a distant memory. The ambitions of the city had diminished so greatly and this, this notion that the city could take care of the people who lived in it was gone.

REPORTER

Treasury Secretary Simon said today that the country is in a recession. For the first time since 1941, the nation's unemployment rate has gone above nine percent. In New York City, the rate of unemployment is much higher than it is nationally, higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

FREEMAN

The 1970s was an economically troubled period for the whole United States and New York was particularly hard hit by this general turn downward. New York hits a 12% unemployment rate in 1975. That's just a huge unemployment rate, and you can feel it all over, every place. It's visceral. People hanging out on the streets, increase in petty crime. A sense of despair in a lot of areas, you know, of giving up.

MAHLER

There was this sense that there were no jobs in New York. People were fleeing the city, moving to the suburbs if they could. Some of the middle-class white families move out, what became known as white flight. There was just sort of a sense of desperation about New York at the time.

REPORTER

The city will need more than God's help to get out of this mess. New York needs $500 million a month to keep its head above water.

MAHLER

In 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy, and it needed a loan from Washington. And President Ford gave it some thought and came back to New York and said, "You're not gonna get a loan."

FREEMAN

After very dramatically turning down a city request, there was a retreat in Washington from that hard line. But they would only give New York City the money it needed to avoid bankruptcy if New York City adopted austerity measures. That meant cutting public services, laying off tens of thousands of workers, and other kinds of measures that assured them that they would get that money back.

DUNN

When those layoffs of police and firefighters came, you know, we were shocked. And that was sort of like a little unwritten social contract that was broken by the city. The police went on strike. The fire went on strike. Sanitation went on strike.

FREEMAN

This big cut in public services at a time when the private economy is in very bad shape, it means hardship. It had immediate impact on New Yorkers and particularly on poor New Yorkers. People can't send the kids off the streets into the library. It's not there anymore. They can't send them to the after-school athletic program to keep them safe. It's not there anymore. So there's a lot of anger and also, I think, a sense of abandonment.

DUNN

Graffiti, crime, drugs, homeless people, squeegee people. People would put in their car windows "No radio," so people wouldn't break their windows. So it was, the city was going down. ERNESTO QUIONEZ: When a population is neglected for so long, and then they keep cutting your social services, your education, your hospitals, your fire departments, it's going to boil and sooner or later something is going to come out of that. And it wasn't going to be pretty.

BILL MOYERS

This is the Bronx in New York. One and a half million people live in this borough. It's the home of the New York Yankees. It has also become the arson capital of the world. Once that smoke on the horizon signified industry, progress, jobs. Now it means someone is burning down a building.

DUNN

We call those years the fire years when the city was burning down. When I came in the fire service, a busy fire company did 1,700 to 2,000 runs a year. In the 1970s we were all doing 5,000 alarms a year. Smoking carelessness, falling asleep with a cigarette, cooking fires and electrical fires. They were the three top causes. But then there was arson, arson for profit, arson for revenge, you wanted to get even to a neighbor. You had arson for fun. A couple of kids with a can of gasoline could light a vacant building and have a ball watching firefighters come with big aerial ladders on a night, hot night and would watch us throw water into this building. You had fires for boredom.

CARL ST. MARTIN

The block below me, of the 60 houses, maybe only five of them hadn't had a fire. You knew that there's a chance that your house could catch on fire. So it caused that next person next door to move. Now that landlord didn't get his rent. This led to the temptation for some people to consider burning the building and collecting the insurance. And it became a domino effect.

MAHLER

On top of all that... There was a serial killer on the loose in New York.

REPORTERS

In New York, the search continues for the Son of Sam, the object of one of the biggest manhunts in this city's history. The killer has taunted authorities by writing two letters, signed Son of Sam.

PURNICK

The NYPD was then and still is the preeminent police department in the country, and he was eluding the NYPD. Everybody was very tense. And it contributed to the sense of nobody was in control. It was becoming embarrassing to say you were a New Yorker after having been so many years when you were proud to be a New Yorker. The city was falling apart. CHRIS "DOC"

VANAGER

By

10

00, that's when I started to hear the noises. And first my mother goes, "What is that?" You heard these bumping noises. Just bump-bump-bump-bump outside. And so my mother opens the door and she looks. And I stick my head out and the staircase door was open a little bit and you see a washing machine going up the stairs. Then after that a refrigerator comes upstairs. Then those giant furniture TVs, you know, the old Zeniths with the sound system in and the record player, those started going up. And it was just box after box after box after box.

ST. MARTIN

It just happened. Like a tinderbox. It went from being lights to being looting. (sirens wailing)

VANAGER

All I remember was people with stuff-- coats, clothes... Like people just have this stuff draped over their arms like, "Yo, you wanna buy this? You wanna buy that?" They stole clothes, electronics, just everything you could think of.

MAHLER

It happened within minutes in all of these neighborhoods. Every single borough in New York was affected by the looting. And it happens, I mean, just instantaneously. Ace Pontiac stored 50 brand new Pontiacs in its garage and the fire department had a rule that if you stored cars inside a building, you had to leave the key in the ignition and you had to put two dollars worth of gas in the tank. Well, all 50 of these cars vanished in the first hour and a half.

MARSHALL

There was people everywhere. Hundreds. Hundreds per block. (sirens pulsing) We responded to a call for assistance from Wyckoff Heights Hospital. And the staff in the emergency room was being hard pressed to keep up with the injuries because the looters were suffering such vicious cuts from the glass. There was blood everywhere. There was people with some hellacious injuries and it really was starting to slide.

ST. MARTIN

I was in medical school, so, you know, I figured might as well just go and work at the hospital. It was packed. Full-blown, people outside in the street waiting to get in. I went in and there were some doctors there. And I explained that I was a medical student and he asked me had I sutured before. And I said, "Well, I'd done a little bit but not really." He says, "Okay, come, come, I'll show you. We need your help, we need your help." All night long I was in a corner just closing up wounds.

WILLIAMSON

We had our store, which was entitled Trophies By Syl. It was a sporting goods and trophy shop. We thought of it as more than a store. We taught the young people how to open a bank account, how to fill out the forms. My husband would go with them, show them how to do that. That evening the lights went out as we were eating. And my husband said, "Oh maybe we better get back over there." And I said to him, "Oh, let me do the dishes first." I probably lost about an hour. When we got to maybe five, six blocks away from our store, we started seeing our merchandise in the street. I just drove up on the sidewalk and I parked the car directly where the doorway was. The people who were inside, when they saw my husband, they said, "Here's Mr. Syl, Mr. Syl is here," and they started running. It was sad in some ways because some people that you saw would be people you would not have expected to see in that capacity. And, and yet they were there.

ALAN RUBIN

I figured, "Okay, I'll walk over to the store." And I saw a crowd on the side of the store. They were pushing and shoving to get into the store and people were coming out carrying things. They got out hi-fi. They got out TVs. The store next to me, the owner came over to me and he says, "I'm shooting in the air to scare them away." He said, "Do you need a gun?" And I said, "No way." I said, "I'll get hurt if I have a gun." I couldn't do anything about it so I just was watching. And my knees started to shake.

WILLIAMSON

We had to stay there all night because if we left, they were gonna come in and take the rest. There was no police to stop them. Who would stop them from taking whatever else was there?

PORTER

One problem with the police is they were told to report to the nearest precinct to them. Almost none of them live in the affected precincts in the poor neighborhoods. The major looting occurred when there were almost no policemen on the street.

MAHLER

It took hours to get cops to the neighborhoods that needed them most. By the time they get there, this thing is on. Bring them out, bring them out!

PORTER

There were a lot of merchants and people who wanted police to come to their stores, stand there with their rifles in their hands and keep the people out. Well, the police didn't have anywhere near the manpower or police power to do that.

MAN

The whole Bronx is going, man. The whole Bronx is going. We'd like to sit here and watch it, but we can't. No, that's all right.

MARSHALL

Our instructions were, "Do the best you can." And we did the best we could. We had sticks. We had our hands. You'd grab people and just toss them out. We were so outnumbered, we'd push them back as far as we could. The people would only respond so far. And then they would start hurling rocks and bottles at us. And then there was a pitched battle in the street. After a while there was what can you do? It was insanity.

It's 12

02 on WABC in New York. We switch now to Steve O'Brien.

O'BRIEN

Thank you, George. Walking into one of the neighborhood establishments, we found still an atmosphere of extreme levity considering the situation. Anyway, people are feeling no pain in most of the establishments around the area.

PORTER

The lights went out and the beer came out, and we had candles and we had a block party. I didn't find out until the next day that there was any looting. Right, I mean, if you didn't live on a commercial street, you didn't know the looting had happened.

KEVIN ZRALY

We were on an island in the sky, isolated from whatever else was happening in all of New York City. We had these emergency lights, but it wasn't enough... I mean, so we started bringing candles in. In hindsight, I don't think that was a good idea because the candles also gave off heat.

Air conditioning now has been out for... since 9

30. But still people... some people we had to ask to leave. It was that kind of thing, you know. They liked the champagne part. It sort of sounds like the Titanic when we talk about, "Did the band play on?" you know? We had a three-piece combo of piano, bass, and guitar. The piano continued on.

MAHLER

It's the city of rich and the city of the poor. And if you weren't in one of those neighborhoods, you know, if you were on the Upper East Side enjoying a candlelit dinner on your roof... You had no idea what was going on all around you. We tripped the lights fantastic On the sidewalks of New York. (applause)

GUS ENGELMAN

George, I just had a Con Ed spokesman on the phone to see if we can get a better idea of when Con Ed will be restoring that power. Here's Ed Livingston right now.

LIVINGSTON

We can't... we really can't estimate, Gus. We're working as hard as we can and as fast as we can, but I don't want to build up any hopes and pick a number of hours because we just can't be sure right now.

JACK FEINSTEIN

We were moving in a step-by-step, very methodic, logical way of picking up the load. The generation was coming on slowly. I'm busy concentrating and I turn around and there's the chairman of the board and the president of the company.

CHARLIE DURKIN

They just wanted me to proceed with a sense of urgency, which we were. Each time we came to a point where we could pick up another network, it took about 15 minutes. That doesn't seem like a lot of time when you're talking one network. But when you have 50 networks, it's a lot of time. Electricity is a kind of a keystone for civility and if we can get the streetlights back on, the traffic lights working and all that kind of thing, there was a much better likelihood that the police and so forth can maintain control.

PORTER

The first group, who went into the stores ten minutes after the blackout occurred, these were a criminal element. Then the stores were open. And then another class of looters came in, people who did not have a criminal background, whom it would not occur to to go and smash the window of a store and go in and grab something. But they sat in their hot apartments seeing people run in and grab stuff and they said, "You know, I could really use some Pampers." QUIONEZ: I remember the rattling. It's a very distinct rattling. A whole bunch of housewives had looted the supermarket at the corner where I used to live, and what they had done is they had taken pantyhose and they had tied shopping carts together so they could make a shopping cart train and then they had loaded all the stuff, all this merchandise, Pampers, toilet paper, food on these carts and were pushing them home. These were the people who tended to get arrested. They had never been arrested before. And here they were arrested and charged with stealing a couch or some clothes. There were not a package of Pampers survived the looting.

MARSHALL

Anybody and everybody, children, women, men, people with jobs, people without jobs. They all got caught up in the moment. They didn't feel like they were committing a crime because the whole general atmosphere, the whole feeling of it was, "Everybody's doing it, why not me?"

OFFICER

Hide your faces, smile, smile. They're hiding their faces.

REPORTER

Is this for looting? Looting, looting.

FREEMAN

Looting is a complicated thing. People do it because they're greedy, because they need stuff. It's also sometimes fun. It's the people on the bottom being on the top for a moment, and they know it's only for a moment, but who's going to stop you? Who's going to stop you? No one can stop you. That can be a thrill. QUIONEZ: It was the neighborhoods that had been neglected that rioted, and it was basically people who were poor and hungry. The media paints it as "Look at these criminals, it's race!" But it's not so much race as it is class. Black people didn't go after white people. Latinos did not go after the Italians. It was more about class. We didn't have, so we went, not even after those who had. We went after their stuff. It's an expression of anger, it's an expression of neglect, and it's an expression of need.

DUNN

If you don't control the crime problem and the people causing the disorder, it becomes a fire problem. The dispatcher ordered us to go from fire to fire. You were driving in the streets. People were waving to you for help, you couldn't stop. Buildings were burning. Cars in the street were burning. Garbage in lots were burning. You know, you'd hear the dispatcher, "No companies available, no companies available." They would only send us to big store fires. You know, we would go to these big supermarket fires, appliance store fires, which were being broken into, looted, and burned.

WILLIAMSON

Not only did they loot the stores, they burned them. And to me, that was the ultimate violation. You took everything, now why are you going to burn the store down as well?

DUNN

Fire is a special effect. You light a car, you've got a spectacular event. Fire, you know, it's got noise. It's got smoke. It's got flame. It's got sound. It was a crazy scene, you know, it was something out of like a world war. (fire crackling, sirens blaring)

REPORTER

New York City in the early morning, after a night of no electric power and so no lights, elevators, subway trains or any trains, airports, air conditioning, traffic signals, television. What it did have in the dark streets was a wild outburst of crime-- arson, looting, mugging and 1,000 false fire alarms.

MAHLER

After the blackout, everyone is trying to make sense of what has happened to New York. There was this sense that New York is not just in financial trouble, not just struggling. But there's something really existentially, foundationally wrong with New York, and New York is in real, real trouble.

VANAGER

When we got up that next day, I got on my bike and rode around the neighborhood, and you just saw everything was gone. And that's when it kind of sunk in that nothing's gonna be the same. You know, nothing's ever gonna be the same. And you just go, "What are people supposed to do now?" You know? QUIONEZ: It sort of felt like some bomb had gone off but instead of destroying the buildings, all you had was a whole bunch of confetti and paper. And it was a very quiet city. I think that one of the reasons for this quietness was because a lot of frustration had been released and even if you yourself had not gone out there to loot, others had. And somehow, I think, that brings you some sort of catharsis.

ST. MARTIN

Once the sun was up, the storeowners were now there. Many of them had roots in the neighborhood and were actually connected to the neighborhood. So they were hurt, and we were hurt.

STORE OWNER

They got everything. I lost all my money. I work about ten years for this. I lost everything. I don't have no insurance, nothing. I have three kids, a wife. I lost everything.

MAN

You've got these people now, they are worried about their business as to whether they can start again in a community like this. As to whether they are gonna trust these people around here, I doubt it. The merchants, they're not gonna trust these people after this. I wouldn't trust them.

REPORTER

So, yourself, what are you going to do now?

STORE OWNER

Well, I tell you, I'm going to leave this great Big Apple to those that want to stay here. I can't fight this anymore.

ALAN RUBIN

Early the next morning, I walk into the store and the lights were still out, but there's enough light for me to see where I'm going. It was horrendous. It was a lot of work. There was gonna be no guarantee that we could make it. More to cut out all the questions, not any major statement, I just put a sign on the window that said, "We're staying."

ELZORA WILLIAMSON

They had taken so much. We lost, I think it was... something like $350,000 worth of merchandise. My whole thought was, "How am I gonna stay in business?" My husband, he just sat down with people who looted the store, talked to them, told them he was disappointed. But he never reacted in such a way that would have been a negative on his part. You know, now that was something I could not do. I could not sit down and look a person in the eye and say, "It's okay." It was not okay. No matter how long we stayed, the store never really was what it had been all those years ago.

VANAGER

My neighborhood stayed that way for probably 15 years. That whole strip never opened back up ever again. Everybody that lived there, those mom-and-pop stores, they just shut down and they left.

We got finished at about 8

00 in the morning. I just... I sat on the hood of the car and looked down Broadway. I said, "I think the neighborhood's done. I think the back has finally been broken." And it was. I truly believe that that night took the carpet out from under the people.

REPORTER

What triggered the blackout? A federal report places the primary blame on Consolidated Edison, saying it was unprepared to deal with the crisis touched off by a severe thunderstorm.

JACK FEINSTEIN

A blackout is almost similar to an airplane crash. It's never just one item. From the first lightning strike to the complete system shutdown, it's a series of events that if any one of them didn't occur or was responded to differently would've prevented the blackout.

REPORTER

It was a night of terror that lasted for 25 hours. What happened to this blinded city? 3,176 people arrested. 132 policemen injured. 1,576 businesses looted or set on fire.

MAHLER

The blackout produced the largest mass arrest in the city's history. We're talking about thousands of people. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of damage and stolen property.

DUNN

There were 1,000 major fires that night, 1,000 major fires. I mean that's mind-boggling. There's a social order that's necessary to live in these dense urban areas that broke down that night.

REPORTER

In the worst slums of the city, the light of mindless violence lit up the sky, as the blackout divided the town into two societies, separate and unequal.

FREEMAN

The blackout gave you an appreciation of the fragility of urban life. You flip the switch and darkness turns to light and you just totally take all this stuff for granted. And an event like that makes you realize how contingent, how fragile all that is. You can't hit your mom because she's your mom, so you hit your little brother. Something like that is what was happening. You couldn't go after these politicians that were killing your neighborhood. So, you went after your little brother. You went after each other.

DUNN

If you wanted to say, "When was the bottom of the decaying, declining New York City?" you would have to say 1977, the blackout. We've had some very good, prosperous times in New York City since then. But this is always there as an example of what could happen.