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the blackout of '77
Lessons from watching people behaving badly
By Richard Laermer
This is the silly season for news: August means nothing happens. Let’s see, Saddam is still sitting pretty, regardless of what CNN says. The NY Times is taking same-sex wedding announcements, though a few days after the Charlotte Observer announced it would do so. And Lizzie accepted a 90-day plea. Big yawn.
Oh, and did I mention Elvis is 25 years dead?
To me the most important story of this week is something all news people have either forgotten about or just plain don’t want to get into, the 25-year anniversary of one of New York’s worst times: the electricity blackout of 1977.
I was having a wonderful time in ’77 because I’d just started my first job. How do I remember that? The date was 7/7/77, which is tough to forget.
I was a clerk and kind of an assistant manager at notorious audio retailer Crazy Eddie. Some will remember the chain by its tagline, "His prices are insane."
I worked in the record department, the one part of the store where you didn’t get robbed.
I worked in the suburbs and at the flagship Village store on Eighth Street, and one fine afternoon, while I was stacking Steve Winwood LPs, the city just shut down. The whole city got dark. This was not the result of some major accident. Con Ed messed up and didn’t allot enough electricity for our air conditioners.
The news of the lights going out was covered in a laissez-faire manner. In 1977, New York was in near ruins. Garbage in the street and a high crime rate was pretty consistent back then. When people that fateful day starting going after one another with bats, it was covered as sort of beside the point.
No one at the federal level was super interested in helping our city out of its problems, which history will record included an electric company, Con Edison, that had no contingency plan if, say, all the electricity went out in the borough of Manhattan, as it did that day.
Suffice it to say, it was pretty damn ugly.
My friends tell me we lit candles, loaned flashlights, helped the elderly, and held a sort of communion in the streets.
My friends romanticize that heated summer evening.
Sure, I know a lot of folks who helped others. But also I saw a lot of bricks being thrown through store windows, and as a young guy that is something you can’t forget.
I held it against the city for years, and maybe that’s why, knock on wood, my life has not been intruded upon by crime. I learned something that day from what I saw.
I got an aching feeling in the pit of my tummy as I watched locals ruin our hard-worked window displays. I hid out in the storage room for a few hours contemplating my life, and at the time it seemed bleak.
As you can imagine, none of these are fond memories. But that’s the point: This was an important moment for New York. Today, news-coverers are working overtime to cover Elvis on his 25-year anniversary “comeback tour,” but they are not showing an iota of interest in the rancid-lettuce days of the city of New York.
No one wants to recall the pockmarks that once covered New York’s now upbeat face.
In 1997, I celebrated the 20-year anniversary of the blackout. I did so alone. I asked a pal at NBC’s "Weekend Today" why no one in his profession cared. He shrugged as if to say he didn't know but we both did know why: In 1997, New Yorkers, and most of the country, were on the economic ride of their lives, enjoying an unreal upswing.
Who wanted to be reminded of a yucky time in the lifespan of our town?
I did, I alone.
Since history is sure to regurgitate and something bad will happen again one day, it’s good to remember those hours when townsfolk, by and large, were in it for themselves.
Should it ever happen again--a blackout, Watts-like looting, the feeling we’re about to sink an island--I hope the rabid news media reminds people that it’s not the first time we had serious troubles and that it won’t be the last. It will be a way for us to see that it didn’t kill us before and won’t now.
Last year we watched a section of our city crumble. And as tragic as it was, and as widely felt as this tragedy was around the world, it still affected only a small part of New York.
Several colleagues who live uptown near West 80th Street did not see their lives changed in the least. They followed the tragedy via wallpaper TV coverage, just as their acquaintances in Boise did, never visiting below Canal Street to experience it first hand.
But August 1977 affected us all.
New York is going to be okay and all we have to do is brace ourselves for a tumultuous “commemoration” of one day in infamy.
Thankfully, nowadays we have all-encompassing support of our government, it seems, and our country and, in some crucial cases, the international community.
Yet I kind of want to see us recall every five years or so the day and a half when city inhabitants acted piss poorly in the face of an unexpected situation.
I wonder if the shoe drops again, will all of us go running for the nearest brick?
For the record, I hope not
August 20, 2002© 2002 Media Life
-Richard Laermer is founder of RLM PR and a regular contributor to Media Life.
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