New York City blackout of 1977
Based on Wikipedia: New York City blackout of 1977
When Lightning Struck Three Times
At 9:37 on the evening of July 13, 1977, New York City went dark. Not just a neighborhood or a borough, but nearly the entire city—eight million people suddenly plunged into blackness on a sweltering summer night. What happened over the next twenty-five hours would sear itself into the city's collective memory: a cascade of looting, arson, and violence that seemed to emerge from nowhere, transforming ordinary streets into scenes of chaos.
But this wasn't random misfortune striking the city. It was the result of three lightning bolts, a series of human miscommunications, and a power grid that failed in ways its designers never anticipated.
The Hour That Changed Everything
The disaster began with physics. At 8:34 that Wednesday evening, lightning struck a substation called Buchanan South, perched along the Hudson River in Westchester County. This facility had one crucial job: converting the 345,000 volts generated by the Indian Point nuclear plant into lower voltages that homes and businesses could actually use.
When lightning hits electrical equipment, circuit breakers are supposed to trip open momentarily—like a safety valve releasing pressure—and then snap closed again once the surge passes. This happens automatically, in fractions of a second. But at Buchanan South, a loose locking nut prevented the breakers from reclosing. The protective mechanism worked exactly as designed to stop the lightning. Then it failed to restart the flow of power.
This was problem one.
Problem two arrived minutes later. Another lightning strike knocked out two more high-voltage transmission lines. Only one came back online. The Indian Point nuclear plant, one of the city's major power sources, was now cut off from the customers who needed its electricity.
Consolidated Edison, the company responsible for keeping New York's lights on, tried to compensate. At 8:45, they attempted to remotely start a backup generating station. It didn't respond. Nobody was there to start it manually. Other plants did fire up, but several had taken turbines offline for routine maintenance. They couldn't produce their full rated capacity.
At 8:55 came the third strike.
Lightning hit the Sprain Brook substation in Yonkers, taking out two more critical transmission lines. The system was designed to prioritize protecting the Indian Point plant, so only one of those lines automatically restored itself. The operator watching the control room displays didn't realize this—the screens weren't designed to make such failures obvious.
Two Operators Talking Past Each Other
What happened next was a tragedy of miscommunication, the kind that seems obvious in hindsight but proved invisible in the moment.
Con Edison's control room operator could see that the remaining power lines into the city were dangerously overloaded. He called the New York Power Pool operators, located far upstate in Guilderland, and asked them to reduce the load on the stressed lines. He meant they should route power through the lines near Indian Point.
The problem was, he didn't know those lines had tripped offline after the 8:55 lightning strike. His control panel hadn't shown him that information clearly.
The Power Pool operators, who could see the full picture, warned him that a major connection to New Jersey was also overloaded. They recommended shedding load—deliberately cutting power to some customers to save the rest of the system.
The two teams kept talking. Neither realized they were operating with fundamentally different understandings of what was happening. Each conversation ended with the underlying problem unaddressed.
Meanwhile, a generator at Con Edison's East River facility developed problems, forcing them to reduce its output. Gas turbines at the Astoria plant tried to come online to help, but they couldn't synchronize properly with the struggling system. Every new problem made the existing problems worse.
The Final Cascade
At 9:08, Con Edison started reducing voltage across the entire system—first by five percent, then by eight percent. This was supposed to cut demand enough to stabilize things. It wasn't nearly enough.
At 9:19, the connection to upstate New York at Leeds substation failed. The 345,000-volt power lines had heated up so much from carrying excess current that they literally sagged. They drooped low enough to touch something on the ground—investigators never determined exactly what—and tripped offline.
This triggered a domino effect. The lines to Long Island started overloading. The connection to New Jersey climbed even higher past its limits.
At 9:22, the Long Island Lighting Company made a fateful decision. They opened their main connection to Con Edison to protect their own system. While they were coordinating with Power Pool operators to make this move, adjustments were made that actually reduced the dangerous loading on their cables. But the Long Island operators didn't notice the improvement. They went ahead and severed the link anyway.
At 9:24, the Con Edison operator tried to manually cut power to specific customers—to sacrifice some neighborhoods to save the rest. The system wouldn't respond.
At 9:29, the last connection to the outside world, a link to New Jersey through Staten Island, tripped. Con Edison was now an island, electrically speaking, isolated from every external power source.
And the city couldn't generate enough power on its own.
When Big Allis Gave Up
Here's where the story becomes almost poetic in its cruelty. Con Edison's system was designed with automatic load-shedding—the ability to drop customers in large blocks to prevent total collapse. But the engineers who designed this system hadn't accounted for a peculiarity of New York's infrastructure.
Unlike most cities, New York buries most of its power lines underground. This makes them invisible and protected from weather, but it also gives them unusual electrical properties. The buried cables had high inductance—a measure of how much a conductor resists changes in electrical current. When the system automatically dropped large groups of customers, it created electrical disturbances that looked, to the generation equipment, exactly like a short circuit inside the machines themselves.
Just after 9:28, the biggest generator in New York City shut itself down. This machine, officially called Ravenswood Generating Unit Number 3, was nicknamed Big Allis. It produced 990 megawatts, enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Its protective systems detected what seemed to be an internal short circuit and immediately took it offline to prevent damage.
There was no short circuit. Big Allis was responding to a phantom, a ghost created by the interaction between the load-shedding system and the city's underground cables.
Without Big Allis, there was no saving the system. By 9:37, exactly one hour and three minutes after the first lightning strike, every power plant serving New York City had shut down. The great metropolis went dark.
A City Already on Edge
To understand what happened next, you need to understand the New York City of 1977. This was not the gleaming, gentrified city of today. This was a city on the brink of bankruptcy, quite literally. Two years earlier, the federal government had famously refused to bail out the city, inspiring the immortal New York Daily News headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead."
The city was still recovering from that near-death experience. Municipal services had been slashed. Neighborhoods that had once been vibrant were hollowed out, their buildings abandoned, their residents desperate.
Adding to the tension, a serial killer who called himself the Son of Sam was terrorizing the city, randomly shooting young couples parked in cars. He had killed six people and wounded seven others. The city was afraid to go outside after dark even before the lights went out.
And it was hot. Brutally hot. The blackout came on the first day of a nine-day heat wave that would push temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. On July 21, the mercury would hit 104 degrees, just two degrees shy of the all-time record set during the Dust Bowl.
Eight million people. No electricity. No air conditioning. No lights. No televisions. No radios in many cases. Just the heat, the dark, and the fear.
The Night of Broken Glass
The looting began almost immediately after the lights went out, and it didn't stop until well into the next day.
In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, seventy-five stores along a five-block stretch were looted and damaged. In Bushwick, also in Brooklyn, arson was so rampant that twenty-five fires were still burning the next morning. At one point, two entire blocks of Broadway were on fire simultaneously. By the time order was restored, thirty-five blocks of that commercial strip had been destroyed: 134 stores looted, forty-five of them also set ablaze.
In the Bronx, thieves stole fifty brand-new Pontiacs from a car dealership. In Brooklyn, witnesses watched young men back cars up to storefronts, tie ropes around the metal security grates, and use their vehicles as battering rams to rip the grates away before emptying the stores.
The police were overwhelmed. Five hundred fifty officers were injured trying to restore order. They made 4,500 arrests—but there were far more looters than there were officers to catch them. The city eventually arrested 3,776 people, the largest mass arrest in New York history. Precinct holding cells overflowed. Prisoners were stuffed into basements and makeshift detention areas.
Mayor Abe Beame addressed the city during the chaos. His words captured both the horror and the helplessness of the moment:
We've seen our citizens subjected to violence, vandalism, theft, and discomfort. The Blackout has threatened our safety and has seriously impacted our economy. We've been needlessly subjected to a night of terror in many communities that have been wantonly looted and burned. The costs when finally tallied will be enormous.
He was right about the costs. A congressional study later estimated the damages at over 300 million dollars—equivalent to roughly 1.5 billion dollars today.
Why 1977 Was Different
New York had gone dark before. In 1965, a blackout had struck the entire Northeast, affecting 30 million people across eight states. But that blackout had become almost a fond memory, celebrated in the playful phrase "Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?" People helped each other. Strangers directed traffic. The city came together.
In 2003, another massive blackout would hit the Northeast, and again, the response would be largely peaceful. People walked home across bridges. Neighbors shared food from defrosting freezers. There was inconvenience, not chaos.
So why was 1977 different?
Commentators at the time proposed various theories. The financial crisis had created desperation in many neighborhoods. The brutal heat made tempers short. The 1965 blackout had struck in the late afternoon, when store owners were still at their businesses, while the 1977 blackout came after merchants had locked up and gone home, leaving their goods unguarded.
There's probably truth in all of these explanations. But perhaps the most telling detail is that the looting continued into broad daylight the next day. This wasn't just opportunism in the darkness. It was something else—a collective rage, perhaps, or a collective hopelessness, finding its outlet in the sudden absence of the normal rules.
The violence extended beyond property crime. Four people died during the blackout. Three were killed in fires—over a thousand fires were set that night. A fourth death was a drugstore owner in Brooklyn who shot a man who was leading thirty youths toward his store, brandishing a crowbar at the security fence.
The Slow Return of Light
Power didn't start coming back until the next morning, around 7 a.m. The first neighborhood to go bright again was a section of Queens. Then Lenox Hill in Manhattan. But restoration was slow and uneven. The Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side, right next to Lenox Hill, was one of the last areas to get power back, not until Thursday evening.
By 1:45 p.m. on July 14, half of Con Edison's customers had power again, mostly in Staten Island and Queens. It wasn't until 10:39 that night—more than twenty-five hours after the first lightning strike—that the entire city was back online.
Most television stations stayed dark for much of July 14, since the areas where their facilities were located still had no power. But two stations managed to stay on the air using backup generators. WCBS-TV resumed broadcasting just twenty-five minutes after the blackout began. WNBC-TV came back eighty-eight minutes later.
In a surreal touch, Belmont Park racetrack, which sat on the border between Queens and Nassau County, decided to run its scheduled races that afternoon. The crowd was sparse—many assumed racing would be canceled—but the horses ran.
At Shea Stadium
The New York Mets were playing the Chicago Cubs when the lights went out. It was the bottom of the sixth inning. The Mets were losing 2 to 1, with Lenny Randle at bat.
When the stadium went dark, the organist, a woman named Jane Jarvis who was known as the Queen of Melody, began playing Christmas carols. "Jingle Bells" rang out through the suddenly dark and sweltering stadium. Then "White Christmas."
The game wasn't completed until two months later, on September 16. The Cubs won, 5 to 2. The Yankees were luckier—they were on the road in Milwaukee that night. Less than a week later, Yankee Stadium hosted the All-Star Game.
The Birth of Hip-Hop?
There's a persistent legend about the 1977 blackout: that looters stole DJ equipment from electronics stores, and this helped spark the hip-hop revolution.
The story has some basis in fact, or at least in testimony. DJ Disco Wiz and Grandmaster Caz, two pioneering figures in early hip-hop, suggested this connection in an interview. Caz later elaborated, claiming that he and Disco Wiz were playing records in a park when the power went out. They initially thought they'd caused the outage themselves, but when they realized it was citywide, Caz went to the store where he'd bought his first equipment and helped himself to a mixing board.
It's a compelling origin story. The birth of a revolutionary art form from the ashes of urban chaos. But most early hip-hop DJs dismiss it. Afrika Bambaataa, one of the founding fathers of hip-hop culture, put it bluntly: "Blackout '77 got nothin' to do with hip-hop. Whoever came with that is talking a lot of BS."
The truth is probably more complicated. The Bronx in 1977 was already incubating hip-hop in community centers and block parties. Did some aspiring DJs acquire equipment during the looting? Almost certainly. Did that theft cause hip-hop to exist? Almost certainly not. The culture was already there, waiting to emerge.
The Aftermath
In total, 1,616 stores were damaged. Firefighters responded to 1,037 fires, including fourteen that required multiple alarms. The Carter administration eventually gave the city over 11 million dollars to help cover the damages.
Mayor Beame accused Con Edison of gross negligence. Con Edison called the blackout an act of God. Both were probably right in their own way. The lightning was an act of God. The system's failure to cope with lightning was something else entirely.
Beame paid a political price regardless of fault. In the mayoral election that fall, he finished third in the Democratic primary, behind Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo. Koch won the general election and would lead the city for the next twelve years.
Con Edison and the other power operators conducted exhaustive investigations. They implemented significant changes to prevent a repeat—better communication protocols, clearer control room displays, more robust automatic systems. These improvements are still in effect today.
But twenty-six years later, in August 2003, another massive blackout hit the Northeast anyway. That one was caused by a software bug in Ohio interacting with overgrown trees touching power lines. The specific vulnerabilities that caused the 1977 disaster had been fixed. But the electrical grid is vast and complex, and there are always new ways for it to fail.
Superman and the Street Light
One last story from that strange night. The film Superman was shooting in New York City in July 1977. When the blackout hit, the production was in the middle of location work.
Tom Mankiewicz, one of the film's writers, later recalled that the cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth, had been trying to draw extra power for his lights by tapping into a street lamp. When the entire city went dark minutes later, Unsworth was convinced for months that he had somehow caused it.
He hadn't, of course. Three lightning bolts, a loose locking nut, some crossed wires in communication, and a generator that spooked at electrical ghosts—that's what turned out the lights. But in the strange logic of that night, one man's guilty conscience about a street lamp made as much sense as anything else.
The Forty-Second Anniversary
On July 13, 2019, exactly forty-two years after the 1977 blackout, Con Edison suffered another major power failure. This one affected 73,000 customers in Manhattan, including much of the West Side and Times Square. Broadway shows were canceled. Elevators stopped. Jennifer Lopez had to cut short a concert at Madison Square Garden.
But there was no looting. No arson. No night of terror. The city had changed. The circumstances had changed. Or perhaps it was just luck—the outage lasted only a few hours, not twenty-five, and it struck a prosperous neighborhood rather than desperate ones.
The 1977 blackout remains unique in New York's history: the night when the lights went out and something darker emerged. It revealed fissures in the city that many had tried to ignore—the poverty, the abandonment, the rage simmering beneath the surface. The power came back on. Those problems took much longer to address.