By Lincoln Anderson
No one expected the sudden blackout of Aug. 14. And no one could have accurately predicted what would have happened afterwards. For example, who knew pizza would be a lifesaver? What follows is a recap of some of the night’s events in Downtown Manhattan, seen during a walkabout in the hours after the lights went out….
A man who gave his name as Ravi was waving his hand over his head amid the bumper-to-bumper gridlock at Spring and Varick Sts. near the Holland Tunnel last Thursday shortly after the blackout hit. Asked if he was directing traffic he laughed, “Something like that.” His car wasn’t moving; he felt at least he could be doing something of use.
Instead of rushing home immediately, others took the opportunity to regroup, like the employees of PMCD Design at 484 Greenwich St., who were sitting on the stoop together. They had been busily working on corrections for a graphic for ABC in Los Angeles and getting ready to post it on the Web and discuss it over the phone with L.A.
“It kind of puts things into perspective,” said creative director Patrick McDonough. “We thought these revisions were really important. Now, everyone has to be accounted for. It’ll all get done….”
Stuck in token booth
At the Spring St. A/C/E subway station, two female Transit Police officers guarded the entranceway. Downstairs, the token booth clerk was still manning his booth following procedure. With a flashlight, one of the officers escorted a reporter into the darkened station.
“We got to take care of all this money. You can’t leave it,” the token booth clerk said, declining to give his name.
Train operator Gregory Pitkouvitch was smoking upstairs, his E train sitting lifeless in the tunnel.
“Now and then I’ll go down and check on it,” he said. “Some homeless guy might want to sleep in there.”
Huge night for pizza
Pizza was a popular food option, mainly because, as customers waiting on line at Ben’s Pizzeria on Spring St. explained, ATM’s weren’t working and credit cards couldn’t be used in restaurants — manual credit card swipers having been replaced by electronic ones.
Luckily the pizzeria’s gas ovens were functioning as Joey, working by candlelight, kneaded clumps of dough into pie after pie.
“Three hundred I make already,” he said. The wait for a pie was an hour.
Paul Vlachos, a Bank St. resident, was going to get some slices with a friend at Ray’s Pizza on Prince St.
“I’m going to call this the Night of Eating Pizza, or the Night People Ate Pizza…,” Vlachos mused
Most restaurants were shut. In the few that remained open, candlelight dining took on new meaning.
At Natural Grocery at Spring and Lafayette Sts., an employee vigilantly stood at the door with a flashlight trained on shoppers, who he only let in in spurts.
“Keeping an eye on ’em,” noted someone waiting on line outside.
Praying for light
In Little Italy, outside Guidetti funeral home, relatives of Pat Grosso, a lifelong Mott St. resident, were sitting on folding chairs on the darkening sidewalk. Tina Renna, Grosso’s niece, said six family members had shone flashlights onto the ceiling to illuminate the parlor while the priest worked the blackout into his sermon. “He said, ‘She’s in the light — and we’re waiting to get into the light.’ ”
A familiar neighborhood figure, a robotics whiz was sitting in front of his building, an 1888 horse stable on Elizabeth St. the windows decorated with white pin lights. A friend came up and animatedly asked him if he had invented a generator.
“That was one invention I didn’t get to!” laughed the man, who a friend called J.T.
Freed from Matrix
Others looked at the darkness philosophically. Perched atop a mailbox at Delancey and Chrystie Sts., Karl Guerre, 33, was tapping away at his laptop. Looking a bit like Bob Marley with his long dreadlocks, he was waiting for the crowds to thin before trying the bridge. He said he was observing a lot about people’s behavior.
“Yeah, it’s no rush,” he said. “About half of them have no survival skills. After all is said and done, they’ll forget that they didn’t need all these so-called necessities and they’ll go back to their all-American life — go through life in The Matrix.”
Hipsters party on
Just south of Delancey St., tenants were drinking beers and partying in the dark in front of 96 Orchard St., where everyone in the building is under age 30, they said.
“It’s bringing the people in the building together,” said Joe Arak, who moved in recently and works at CBSnews.com, of the blackout. “In five minutes, I’ve met like 20 people.”
“We should do it once a week — no power, no nothing,” said Fernando Gil, nightlife editor of Black Book magazine.
Darren Bresnitz had come from Williamsburg.
“The Puerto Ricans over there are barbecuing on every corner. They’re hooking everyone up,” he said. “When [something] like this happens, people just get together.”
Meanwhile the hipsters shared the wealth too, claiming that they had just given a beer to a police officer who had been watching them and eventually dropped by.
“He pounded it,” said Gil. “We gave him a Rice Krispies treat and he asked if there were any mushrooms in it” — as in psychedelic, not Portobello.
In front of Gator Shoes, next door, Lee Fermin was sitting guard because the metal shutters, electrically operated, were stuck in the open position. There’s a manual chain — of course it was jammed.
The store sells shoes costing up to $900 made from crocodile, alligator, ostrich and stingray. Asked if he would be there all night, Fermin smiled and said yes.
Music on Clinton St.
On Clinton St., on the other side of Delancey St., the block was solidly Hispanic. Somewhere in the dark on the west side of the street a group had gathered to make and enjoy music. First the bongos started. Then the guitar came in with a steady strumming. Then a tenor voice rose in the dark, singing something about a corazon. Other voices joined in. The song finished and there were cheers.
There was a slight feeling of danger on the pitch-black block. “Bitch ass,” muttered a shadowy dreadlocked figure in passing. “Rough ’im up,” said one of a group of young boys as they sauntered by, some twirling glow sticks. A flashlight provided a bit of a feeling of protection.
Similarly, writing a note to a friend by candlelight in front of Lotus Bar at Clinton and Stanton Sts. — where a crowd was hanging out on the sidewalk and beers were selling for $2 — Jennifer Sayles, 32, a film editor, said she found the blackout a little scary. She had played the role of the Good Samaritan twice that evening. On the West Side, she’d bumped into a woman who seemed in distress and escorted her back to the woman’s place in Battery Park City, where young professionals were socializing on the roof. Then she’d come across a young woman crying on Houston St. because her cell phone wouldn’t work, staying with her until she calmed down.
“In both cases I had the same feeling,” Sayles said. She presently biked off to deliver the note — and probably help more people.
In the East Village at 3B on Avenue B, the mood was anything but somber as bar-goers lustily belted out a medley of classic hits like “La Bamba” and “Stairway to Heaven.”
Garden sanctuary
For three East Village filmmakers, the Sixth and B Garden at E. Sixth St. and Avenue B was the perfect refuge.
Cari Machet and Anne Hanavan had just finished making copies of a flyer for the Avant Garde(n) Summer Cinema Extravaganza, part of the Howl Festival, and were in a vintage clothing store when the power went out. By chance, they met up later and decided to go to the garden with Rafael Sanchez. They came well prepared with olive spread, pitas, cookies, beverages and a seven-in-one game set.
“We were standing outside of the building and it was hot and it’s so much cooler here and we wanted to play cards,” said Machet of their decision.
“We made s’mores. We had all the fixins’,” said Hanavan as Sanchez massaged her feet, drummers and musicians played around a fire and incense wafted, under a soaring willow tree.
Earlier, three naked people had walked down Avenue B.
“They were pretty,” said Machet in their defense.
Quest for fire
Capping off the night’s events, as if it wasn’t hot enough already, was a gigantic bonfire in Tompkins Sq. Park. The fire, the biggest and longest in the park in recent memory, reportedly started about 7 p.m. and blazed until about 3:20 a.m. Although the Fire Department tried to put it out twice earlier, eventually they just let it burn. A big crowd of young people gathered around the flames, accompanied by the preferred blackout music — a drum circle. The flames were stoked with rolls of storm fencing, palettes and anything wooden that people could lay their hands on, even a homeless person’s cardboard. The homeless person’s shopping cart was also tossed in the flames, as was a messenger bike, wire garbage cans and a skateboard that someone “sacrificed.”
As one incredulous neighborhood veteran put it, “There’s a fire, I’m drinking beer in the park and it’s past midnight.” It certainly wasn’t a typical park night.
Bare-chested young men jumped and in some cases walked or even “vogued” over the flames. However, at one point two men launched themselves from opposite sides of the flames and collided in midair, with one landing in the inferno. “Ohhh!” the crowd exclaimed in pain. Looking hurt, the man staggered off.
Not wearing riot helmets, police walked around the park, keeping an eye out, but not trying to stop things, and not getting too near the action at the big fire. Some observers said it was probably best to “let the kids have their fun” instead of risking a confrontation.
At one point around 3 a.m., young men started heaving glass bottles at the fire from about 40 ft. away. Outside the park, a woman in sandals sat on the curb, pressing a bandage to her bloody ankle where she had been hit by some of the shattered glass.
