i keep a diary

August 14, 2003

The NYC Power Blackout of 2003

So I'm sitting in the office working on Thursday, getting through the day pretty well considering how late I'd been out the night before, when suddenly, around 4:15pm, all the power goes out in our office.

A minute or so later, my friend Colin, whose office is three blocks north of ours on Broadway calls me on my cell. He asks "Hey, is your power out there?" "Yep," I reply. He gets all funny and goes, "Yeah, well the power's out up here too." I'm like, "Well, that makes sense. You're only up the street three blocks. We're probably on the same power grid." Colin pauses dramatically and says, "Nope. I'm actually in a meeting up in Time Square. There's no power up here either."

That's when I realized that this was more than just an ordinary power outage.

Thursday, August 14th

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4:31pm: Here's a shot from our office window of the intersection of Broadway & Spring St.
crowd ˆ nyc
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And here's a shot looking north up Broadway. The traffic lights were all out so people were just walking in the street. The amount of noise coming from the street was incredible.
crowd ˆ nyc
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All the circuits in the northeast blown....so much like the tiny mind of one Mr. Grant Stoddard who couldn't seem to wrap his little noggin around the situation.
nyc ˆ grant
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Also, try to keep in mind that it's like 95 degrees outside. As our office started heating up (no AC, remember?), I decided to lay down and take a nap and wait for the power to come back on. I must've fallen into a deep sleep, because Grant managed to brain me pretty good. He loses points for not having my face in the pic, tho. (Thank god).
asleep ˆ brained ˆ grant ˆ me
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Around 6pm, after waiting for 90 minutes and still no power, the office was getting unbearably hot and we said fuck it and left. Grant, Triple-M (that's Mr. Michael Martin to you) and myself walked over to the East Village and started looking around for a place to eat. Somewhere on Avenue C we ended up being enticed by the promise of a "Black Out BBQ" and went in.
sign
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Hot, sweaty and tired in a way that only comes from having recent, unwanted proximity to another man's plumbag, we plunked our party down at a table outside in the back patio.
grant ˆ me
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See? I told you EmEm was with us! Nobody ever believes us. See how he's trying to hide behind that big beer? This guy hates photos like fat people hate salads.
beer ˆ michael martin
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Here's me at my utter sweatiest and crankiest.
beer ˆ cranky ˆ the bird ˆ me
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We sat around waiting for the BBQ to start and after a while the bartender finally came out to the back patio with a whole cooler full of meat - but then they weren't able for the life of them get the grill going (they had a charcoal grill, but couldn't find the briquette chimney that makes igniting the charcoal really easy). A former teen-pyromaniac, I could only sit by for so long before offering up my assistance. I got that shit cookin', yo. And this guy thinks he's the Firestarter. Psssh.
bbq ˆ fire ˆ me
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After I got the briquettes going, we realized it would still be at least a half an hour before they were ready to cook food - which was too long. So we left and decided to find somewhere that had food ready. As soon as we got outside, EmEm decided to cut out and begin his long home over the bridge to Billyburg (no power means no subway, ya heard?). Here's Grant posing with one of the bunches of flares that were set up to illuminate each intersection.
grant
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The walk home from dinner was surreal. The city was almost completely dark yet the city streets were mobbed with people. More specifically, people yelling and shouting and drinking smoking. Way too overtired to be dealing with the hippy-jamesqe nonsense that was starting to brew - I decided to pack it in early. The pastry shop right next to the entrance to my apartment had set up on the streets and were selling all their treats for fifty cents a piece (trying to get rid of them before they spoiled)!
cake ˆ strangers
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Back at my apartment, we lit a ton of candles and hung out in the kitchen with Victoria; listening to the radio and trying to learn more about when the power might come back on.
105 bowery ˆ grant ˆ victoria
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A little bit later, a squinty, cranky Tara showed up and Grant and I tried to entertain her by...
cranky ˆ sweaty ˆ grant ˆ me ˆ tara
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...making stupid faces and...
ugly face ˆ grant
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...sculpting our sweaty hair into comical 'do's. Keep in mind, the power's been only around seven hours and we're already reduced to stuff like this. Ashamed and discouraged, we all realized that the sooner we just went to bed, the sooner we might wake up to discover that the power would be back on.
messy hair ˆ sweaty ˆ ugly face ˆ me

Friday, August 15th

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The next morning Grant, Vic and I woke up and there was still no power. We decided to hit the streets and find a place serving breakfast. Everywhere we looked, there were small, but telltale signs of the previous night's mischievousness. Case in point: this brilliant "Drink Piss 74" graffiti that someone spray-painted on the window of the Astor Place Starbucks. (I wonder if that's someone's IM handle or something?)
graffiti ˆ grant
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Most places were either mobbed with people or out of food entirely. And so after walking around for over an hour, we finally settled on Life Cafe (on 11th and Avenue B).
brunch ˆ grant ˆ victoria
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All Life Cafe had to order was a plate of scrambled eggs with half-assed home fries. (But anyone who has eaten at Life Cafe will know that this dish is actually an improvement on their normal brunch menu. Someone should permeantly cut the power to their kitchen. Jesus).
brunch ˆ food
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After our (not-so) deliscous breakfast, Grant and I walked over to Tara's apartment to try to get her to come walk around the city with us. We found her all ornery, in a towel, refusing to get out of bed. Her plan was to just stay asleep until the power came back on.
asleep ˆ tara
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Besides, she was busy dog-sitting Shitty The Wonder Dog! Gooooo Shitty!
dogs ˆ falcor
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Later on in the evening, we ran into David and Miye outside of their apartment on Mott Street. When I casually asked "What's new?", they got really excited and replied "Our bidet! You have to come in and try it!" Grant, being the one used to braving new things in the name of science, (well, that and the fact that he likely had a saucy ass crack) immediately volunteered to hop on and check it out.
toilet ˆ grant
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Before David had time to warn him, Grant turned the dial marked "Water Pressure" all the way to the most powerful setting. Check out his priceless expression as his O-ring is almost permanently damaged by a geyser that could give Old Faithful a run for its money.
best ˆ surprise ˆ toilet ˆ yell ˆ grant
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After Grant was done, ummmm, "freshening up," we went back out to Mott Street and got and awesome meal cooked for us on the sidewalk out front of the restaurant Rice.
food
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At 8:59pm, just as we sat down on a bench to eat our dinner the power was finally restored to Soho and the Lower East Side (we were the last neighborhoods in all of NYC to get it restored going a whoppoing 28 hours and 28 minutes without it)! As the lights came up all around us, people everywhere were laughing and clapping and cheering and singing. Yay, power!
hat ˆ thumbs up ˆ grant ˆ me