Remembering the ’77 Blackout
Some
people on Broadway in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn could
be seen looting during the 1977 blackout. (Photo: Tyrone Dukes/The New
York Times)
Friday marks the 30th
anniversary of the 1977 blackout, a chaotic event that became a symbol
of the malaise affecting America’s cities. In little more than 24 hours —
the blackout lasted from 9:34 p.m. on July 13 to 10:39 p.m. on July 14 —
1,000 fires were reported, 1,600 stores were damaged in looting and
rioting and 3,700 people were arrested. Neighborhoods from East Harlem
to Bushwick were devastated. The authorities later estimated that the
total cost of the blackout exceeded $300 million.
The summer of 1977 has
become legendary in the city’s consciousness. The police were searching
for the serial killer known as the Son of Sam; the Yankees made their
way to the World Series despite a clubhouse feud; and Edward I. Koch,
Mario M. Cuomo and Abraham D. Beame fought their way through a fractious
Democratic mayoral primary.
In The Times’s City section on Sunday, the novelist Ernesto Quiñonez recalls his experience as an 11-year-old in East Harlem during the blackout. On City Room, James Goodman, the author of “Blackout,” and Jonathan Mahler, the author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning,” are taking questions from readers.
In The Times’s City section on Sunday, the novelist Ernesto Quiñonez recalls his experience as an 11-year-old in East Harlem during the blackout. On City Room, James Goodman, the author of “Blackout,” and Jonathan Mahler, the author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning,” are taking questions from readers.
The New York Post begins a five-part series today commemorating the 1977 blackout with an article on how the blackout pushed the city “from hardship to chaos” and a sidebar on how stranded revelers passed the time. Steve Dunleavy, a Post columnist, recalls the police response to the blackout. A graphic in The Post tallies the blackout’s toll.
The Daily News, in a special section, takes stock of the tumult. The blackout portion
of the special section includes a column by Michael Daly, an interview
with the editor Arthur Browne and an interactive timeline. Articles from
The News’s archives include a main roundup of the blackout news, an article describing how residents soldiered on, an article describing the restoration of power and a 2003 profile of a blackout looter.
Tonight, ESPN will begin an eight-part miniseries based on Mr. Mahler’s book about the summer of 1977. (In a review
today, Richard Sandomir writes that the miniseries “succeeds because of
the mutually-assured-destruction brand of combustibility among its lead
characters — there is something of “Barbarians at the Gate” in the
gleeful madness of the Yankees plot — and because of the incidents that
the writers and director choose to recreate.”)
Online resources on the 1977 blackout abound. Time’s cover “Blackout ’77: Once More, With Looting,”
published by the magazine on July 25, 1977, more than a week after the
blackout, captured the widespread sense that the blackout somehow
unleashed forces of social disorder. The lead article in the issue, “Night of Terror,” offers a masterly chronology of the blackout. Other articles in the issue offered explanations for the looting and an account of the blackout’s technical causes.
Readers are invited to
share their memories of those two humid, stressful days in 1977, and
their thoughts on how the blackout shaped the city.
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