Lights Out
Brian Macaluso looks back at the August, 2003 blackout in New York City.
When the power went out, we all held our breath. It was August 14th, 2003, one month before the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and many of us in New York City were still feeling shaky. You couldn’t blame those who assumed terrorism. It was on all our minds.
The blackout was an ordeal for most. Trains were stuck in tunnels. Traffic was at a stand-still. Thousands of people flooded the streets. Elevators were stuck between floors. Refrigerators and freezers throughout the city were off. Food perished from the heat. Hospitals operated on emergency power, waiting for doctors who’d never arrive.
But it quickly became one of those New York City catastrophes that unifies everyone. Spontaneous parties erupted in parks, in the streets, and on rooftops. Strangers hooked up with each other in hot, dark bedrooms and alleyways. Couples engaged in disaster sex. (How many of today’s 21-year-olds were conceived that night, and born the next spring?)
For me, though, the blackout of 2003 was an insane work emergency. In those days I was a freelance audio engineer and tech at WNYC Radio. Most days I could be found maintaining studios, preparing rooms for John Schaefer’s Soundcheck or The Brian Lehrer Show. Or maybe I was investigating a buzzing sound in the Radiolab studio.
At the time, WNYC was located in the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street, across the street from City Hall. (It’s now called “The David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building.”)
The Manhattan Marriage Bureau was also located there. Often, on my way to the elevators, I’d have to skirt long lines of New Yorkers queuing up to elope—or shotgun- or green-card marry. Although it was inconvenient for me, I was charmed, and thought, Looks like fun. Maybe someday... It was often a party on that line to the chapel. Some even came in costume: Zombies; King Kong and Fay Wray.
The WNYC studios were on the 25th floor, and the views, even from the bathrooms were stunning. It was always a thrill to catch glimpses of the Courts, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Verrazano Bridge, and much of Lower Manhattan. Only two years before the blackout, you could see the Twin Towers, now conspicuously, tragically gone.
***
WNYC is a public utility. No matter the circumstances, it needs to stay on the air and report the news. The station had a full floor of backup batteries, but only a few hours of power remaining. What were we going to do? We all scrambled.
Soon a crew was assembled to transport reporters, producers, engineers, and gear to a backup facility in Midtown. I was enlisted as part of that crew.
We had to travel with dollies filled with equipment from lower Manhattan to midtown in a city-wide blackout. With the subways down, it was decided we’d take the station’s van. But there were throngs of people moving through the streets. Throughout lower Manhattan, no vehicles were moving. We had to abandon the van, and hoof it with all the gear in tow.
The blackout was an ordeal for most. Trains were stuck in tunnels. Traffic was at a stand-still. Thousands of people flooded the streets. Elevators were stuck between floors. Refrigerators and freezers throughout the city were off. Food perished from the heat. Hospitals operated on emergency power, waiting for doctors who’d never arrive.
But it quickly became one of those New York City catastrophes that unifies everyone. Spontaneous parties erupted in parks, in the streets, and on rooftops. Couples engaged in disaster sex. (How many of todays 21-year-olds were conceived that night, and born the next spring?) Strangers hooked up with each other in hot, dark bedrooms and alleyways.
We needed to get to midtown before the live feed died. Step by sweaty, harried step, we made our way up through Chinatown, Little Italy, the Village, up 6th Avenue, through the Flower District, past Herald Square, to our final destination: 48th and 6th.
By some miracle, we made it in just in time. We got the skeleton production crew settled in, and kept WNYC on the air when it was needed most. I often find myself looking back and wondering how we managed to do this.
***
At around 8pm, I was finally able to leave. Now I had to walk all the way home to the East Village, alone in the deepening dark.
The sun was setting, the city’s shadows lengthening. The streets were becoming canyons of light against a blackout skyline. In the near absence of artificial light, the once familiar cityscape was rendered foreign and surreal.
I continued downtown in the fading light. As the street numbers descended, so did a darkness that hadn’t been this total in a very long time. I began to lose my way and resorted to using my new Motorola flip-phone as a flashlight, to help me read the street signs. It was surprisingly harrowing. After more than a decade living there, I thought I knew the city like the back of my hand.
When I finally hit 14th Street, I was relieved. I walked, by memory, toward 8th Street and Avenue B, where I lived. On my way, I saw a ball of light coming from the middle of Tompkins Square Park and was drawn to it. As I got closer, I saw it was a huge bonfire.
It was like a tribal expression. There was music and partying. People let loose in the relief of learning the blackout wasn’t another instance of terrorism, just an overloaded grid that failed and took out practically the whole goddamned eastern seaboard. It was strange, and special. If only I had someone to share it with.
At the bonfire, I searched the crowd for anyone I knew. So many friends had left—some because of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. I still knew some people in New York, in my neighborhood, but their numbers had dwindled. People around the bonfire were singing and dancing and sharing food that bodegas and pizza shops had given away. There was joy in the otherworldly darkness, and I was lonely for someone to experience it with.
***
I sat alone by the fire, consumed by feeling alone—not knowing that at that very moment, the woman who would two years later become my wife was sitting at that very same bonfire, on the other side of it, feeling the same loneliness.
…Not knowing that two months later, we would meet by chance, fall in love, and make a life together. That in 2005 we’d marry—at the marriage bureau in the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street—then make a champagne toast in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge.
…Not knowing that shortly after that, we’d find ourselves in one of those stately courts you could see from the WNYC bathrooms, fighting for our right to stay in our apartment.
***
After a year in housing court, we receive the bad news: Despite winning what turned out to be a landmark case, we, and all the other tenants of our building, were losing our leases. This news brought with it a different kind of darkness. It marked the end of our time in the city we loved, the place where we’d met.
We no longer had New York. But New York had given us each other. And that brought with it a kind of enduring light, the kind that even a faulty grid can’t extinguish.
Brian Macaluso is a musician, audio engineer, and I.T. professional in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley. He has an essay in Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY.
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I love everything about the Sari and Brian love story, no matter who is telling it. This brings up so many vivid memories.
I was eight months pregnant with my now adult twin daughters. I had to walk down 27 flights of stairs and walk to my boss’s place in the West Village (it was incredible how many people offered me water and asked if I was OK). I couldn’t reach my husband (who, for all he knew, missed the birth of our kids). Eventually, I found our way back to our place on 14th between Avenues B and C. He was hanging outside having cocktails with all of our neighbors, most of whom we had never spoken to before). They were all relieved that I wasn’t in the hospital. It was a crazy night but restored my faith in this crazy city.
"New York had given us each other." Two souls at a bonfire in the dark. Connecting in person a few months later. And now, married 20 years! So very sweet, and what a metaphor!