I heard on NY1 this morning that it was the fifteen year anniversary of the blackout. I hadn’t thought of the blackout in a long time.

I had experienced no power before in the eighth grade when there was an ice storm in Rochester. The weight of the ice cracked branches that fell on power lines all over the city. It was kind of a mixed blessing to miss school for a week but also have no light or television.

When the blackout hit in 2003, though, I was scared out of my mind. It was close enough to 9/11 that I still had a Chicken Little response to most things. I was working in the same building that I had been working in on 9/11. I walked out into the street with the rest of the city, just like on 9/11. I heard that the power outage stretched up to Canada and as far west as Cleveland and I could only think of one thing: terrorist attack.

I expected vans full of terrorists to descend on the city like some nightmarish Red Dawn remake.

The terrorists were not forthcoming, though.

I suppose the 2003 blackout speaks to the kind of New York that I live in. the 1977 blackout was a disaster. There was looting and violence. In 2003, after word spread that this had nothing to do with terrorism, we just set about buying all the beer before it got warm and getting in line for a pizza.

A co-worker of mine, Alan, had a place in Manhattan about ten blocks from work. There was a pizza place across from his apartment building and the ovens were gas powered. Apparently they were filling orders for news organizations in addition to every hungry person in the vicinity so it took us a couple of hours to finally get our pie. But the beer stayed cold.

Then it turned into a pretty fun day. A lot of people were hanging out outside. It was cooler than inside because at least the air was moving. And you forget how dark hallways are without electricity. Being inside was temporarily creepy.

At one point, Rudy Giuliani came walking down the street. It was 2003 so I was happy to see him. My friend Jon said, “if there was one public figure that you wanted to see walking down the street, it’s Rudy.” He was still coasting on the good will of 9/11 efforts, not desperately clinging to 9/11 like he would years later. I suppose he was still an asshole then but not yet the evil buffoon he’s become.

Because the subways weren’t working, I was hoping to crash in Manhattan. I had it better than most. Most commuters were stranded or waiting in hordes to catch a bus. I still had to work on finding a place to sleep. Just as the sun started to set, Alan, outside of whose apartment we were staying, on whose floor I could have slept, asked me, “So, where are you going to crash tonight?” Message received, my friend.*

I decided to go see if my friend Josh was home and if I could stay with him. If not, I had a long walk back to Brooklyn. Josh had one of the sweetest setups that I knew of in New York. He lived at 17th Street and Broadway, right at Union Square, two buildings up from what is now a Pret a Manger. He was above a pizza place (a bad one that was closed that day anyway) and had a huge loft, that he shared with three other people. Apparently, back in the nineties, when anything below 23rd street was still a demilitarized zone, a DJ started renting that loft. It was a big space and he wanted to throw parties. So, he created second floor in the loft and a couple of rooms, including a DJ booth up at the front. That DJ moved on and this place had passed from roommate group to roommate group by word of mouth for years.

Josh and his roommates were eventually forced out and the whole building was renovated. The loft is now a luxury apartment (judging from what I can see through the windows from the street) and the pizza place is now a Verizon Store. It was fun while it lasted.

But on August 14th, 2003, I decided to walk from 44th street to 17th street in the dark in the hopes that Josh was home. I’m pretty sure we couldn’t call because all the cell towers were out too. I must have just shouted up to the second floor and found that Josh was home and I had a place to stay that night. We hung out in the dark for a bit and then I crashed on his couch for one of the most uncomfortable nights of sleep of my entire life. The air was stagnant and muggy and whatever part of my body was making contact with the couch at any particular time felt like it was covered in a hot wool blanket.

The next day, we went out to Union Square Park and just waited for power to come back on. I think I read a Harry Potter book. By that night street lights started to come back on and I was able to make it back home.

It was probably one of the most low key events in recent New York history. Looking back, I started off scared of disaster but ended up having a good time, kind of like most things in my life.