Lucky for me I’m a procrastinator or I’dve been trapped in the elevator right when the lights went out here in New York—instead I was standing in front of my microwave with a plateful of orange chicken and shrimp fried rice I was just going to put in and reheat for lunch.
I went to the window to check if it was just my building and saw Allan, who runs the super expensive vintage store across the street, standing outside telling everyone there’s no power, there’s no power. Lucky me again, living on the third floor it’s no big deal to hustle Jarvis down the stairs and out the front door. Our doorman Fred had his favorite little radio out and said he’d heard the lights were out all through the Eastern Seaboard and wouldn’t be on for quite a while, so I decided to hang out at the dog run until it got dark since it’s always cooler there than anywhere else in the neighborhood. Every two hundred feet or so on the way there I’d see this:

People crowded around cars with their radios on, listening for any news about the power. There were already people picnicking in the park, some of whom were from out of the neighborhood and looked like they were psyching themselves to maybe spend the night on benches if the subway system didn’t get working.
On my way home at 7:30 I found that most of the neighborhood restaurants and stores had either closed early (all the cafes), sold all their perishables on the cheap (Zabar’s moved their product to the sidewalk and were mobbed, Emack and Bolio’s were selling a scoop for a dollar), or had long lines snaking outside and down the block. Up till about 11 there were still crowds walking up the avenues trying to get uptown, and to Queens and the Bronx. All the bars on Amsterdam (and there are a lot of bars on Amsterdam) were open and packed with people, not just from the neighborhood but lots of people who’d been walking for hours and just given up on getting home that night.
One of my neighbors stayed in our lobby waiting for her boyfriend, who was working in Brooklyn when the power went out; he got here at 10:30, four and a half hours since they first talked, having walked all the way. He had photos of the crowds from Manhattan he struggled against crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and the buses packed tighter than sardines he didn’t even bother thinking of lining up for that passed him as he made his way to the Upper West Side. Weird but I was even happier to see this guy that I’d never even met before get home to his girl last night than I was when the power came back on again this morning.
(I’ll update this post later on tonight. Power came back to the Upper West Side early this morning but Verizon DSL is still down, the wifi in my neighborhood is currently non-existent and so the only reason I can even get online now is that NYU’s finally got their slow-as-molasses dial-up working again.)
More on the blackout from other New Yorkers: Ranjit took tiny Sidekick photos of his walk home over the Brooklyn Bridge, Chris started the day craptastically but made her ordeal sound almost fun, Paul watched as Brooklyn slowly drunkened, Grant wrote his story in the dark, on his laptop’s batteries, Gina was caught at work and walked the Manhattan bridge home, Robert took photos all the way home to Williamsburg, Elayne reflected on the behaviour of New Yorkers in the crisis on her way home to the Bronx, Matt took lots of photos, Tien Mao saw a sign at a bar that said “BLACKOUT SPECIAL, Smoking Permitted, Fuck Bloomberg”, and Amy was stuck on the Q train. Gothamist was out of town (do I smell an alibi? Gothamist has been loving the photoblogs and flashmobs, after all) but picked out the best photos from the wires.