New York blackout

On an evening in November 1965 I was sitting in a hotel room in Chicago, placidly watching the telly when the programme was interrupted by an announcer begging us to stand by for a newsflash.

It was a flash which came at us just before 6 p.m. on the radio on 12 April 1945 to announce that Franklin Roosevelt had dropped dead in Georgia. And it was a flash that obliterated the early afternoon TV programmes on 22 November 1963 and announced the shooting of President Kennedy. And, both times, no regular programmes at all were shown until the dead presidents were buried. 

Naturally the networks have to make compensation for the monies paid in to them by the deprived advertisers. It's of course tasteless to mention this at the time of such national disasters but the thought does cross the minds of the men in charge. 

Well, on that November evening, eleven and a half years ago, the flash coming over the line in Chicago was one that concerned the whole country only at intervals in the regular TV programmes. It was the word of the sudden failure in a key power station in upstate New York close to the Canadian border which overloaded and blacked out the entire electrical system throughout New York state, neighbouring Connecticut and some of New Jersey. 

Very soon after the flash came in we were able to see the New York blackout, televised for the benefit of comfortable viewers in other parts of the country, and I've often wondered since how they managed first to get the pictures and second how to transmit them over dead wires, but they did. And friends in Chicago were calling up and saying 'Ooh, ah! Have you seen those great pictures of New York?'. 

There was, you should recall, a moon that night – a full moon – which any cameraman will tell you is never bright enough to give you a picture of moonlight, not a motion picture anyway. In the movies, moonlight scenes are always shot at high noon through heavy filters that make the full sun look like the full moon. In Hollywood, they found out long ago that intimate romantic scenes, where the soundtrack carries nothing heavier than a tender whisper, moonlight scenes are better shot indoors, in soundproof studios against backdrops of artificial skylines with an artificial moon the size of an approaching planet. 

Well, this time, I was even farther away from New York than Chicago, on a flying visit to London, England, no less, and I read and heard about it, as you did, in the newspapers and in foggy television pictures shot by the light of torches or motorcar headlamps. Two impressions, I gather, came over that overwhelmed all others. One was the looting of shops and stores. The other was the sight of young men in jeans and T-shirts turning themselves into impromptu traffic cops and helping people get home. 

But from telephoning friends in New York, I picked up a refreshingly comic note which I haven't seen reported in the papers. Manhattan is, as you know, an island bounded on the east by, logically, the East River, and on the west by the Hudson. As you look across the Hudson River from New York's west side, you can see reflected in the river the lights of buildings on the New Jersey side. And on Wednesday night, after 9.30 when the grid failed, the people who were at their steering wheels groping their way through the black streets, many of them heard that New Jersey was untouched by the blackout, so they headed there. 

There was in consequence a dense crawl of cars towards the George Washington Bridge and, of course, not by any means exclusively by people who lived in New Jersey. New Jersey was suddenly a haven, a sanctuary, a beacon beckoning the doomed away from the black night and the crashing shop windows and the screaming police sirens of New York. 

So, what happened was that thousands of people who lived not only in New York but were in town from Connecticut across Long Island Sound, drove farther and farther away from their homes and the motels of New Jersey did a roaring business. This, it struck me, was the exact opposite of the terrified traffic that drove out of New Jersey into New York, New England, anywhere on the notorious, dreadful night in (was it 1938?) when Orson Welles put on the radio his mock documentary account of the invasion of the New Jersey coast by the men from Mars. 

The programme had started with a brief announcement that what followed was a fictional guess at what might happen if, after all, Mars really was inhabited by pointy-headed saucer-faced people with an itch to conquer the earth. But how many people tune in for the first 30 seconds of any programme? To many people, the Welles' programme was Doomsday and thousands of families in New Jersey packed up their minimum needs, jumped into their cars and headed west for salvation. 

Well, the good thing about Wednesday night's chaos was the quick initiative of young people out on the streets, who either tried to direct traffic or went off to the nearest hospitals and helped out as orderlies. Not to mention the enterprise of loiterers around Times Square who had flashlights in no time and offered to guide people home at a flat two-dollar rate. Considering the dubious occupations of some of the characters around Times Square – it is the Mecca of hustlers from 14 to 30, of pimps and what was once cruelly called perverts and now are known as variants or deviants. I think I would have chosen to stagger alone as far to the east and north of Times Square as possible. 

The worst thing about Wednesday night was, of course, the looting. In 1965, it was winter and a full moon and, as the papers said, crime stood still. But this time you have to be careful about letting the phrases about splintering store windows and battling cops not spread as a blanket description of what was happening over the whole island. Manhattan, in fact, was least afflicted by looting except on the Upper West Side which is where blacks and Puerto Ricans were huddled on a tropical hot night in the stew of crowded tenements. Most of the looting was, and it could have been predicted, done in crummy areas in Brooklyn, most of all on the Upper East Side in the borough known as the Bronx. 

For many years, the Bronx, a vast, desolate district, an overspill to the east of Harlem, has been what can only be called a human disaster area. From time to time, I pick up a cab with an old driver who's lived in the Bronx all his life. He's an old and despairing black man. He tells about his own childhood. Frugal, pretty threadbare but decent enough. There were random street fights in those days but restricted to known toughs. And the decent families kept their children away from them on weekdays and in the churches on Sundays. Well, they grew up and now their children, his grandchildren, he says, are lost and beyond salvation, even of the most rough, secular kind. My block, he says, streams all day long with pushers. Some of them no more than kids, pushing heroin and speed to other kids and every night there's a fire. I'm not sure what the figure is for the annual average of fires in the New York boroughs. 

They are, of course, each of the five boroughs, as large as a largest city but take... take any city and say maybe 50, 80, 100 fires a year. Last year, in the Bronx, alone, there were over 3,000 serious fires. Not a little blaze in a waste basket in the kitchen or somebody who'd let the steak catch fire in the oven – it would hardly be a steak anyway – but houses, full-blown arson. Great soaring blazes, enough to fetch the fire brigades, sometimes, for the fires are often started to bait the firemen into their duty so they can then be stoned and assaulted. 

I have a friend, an art director for one of the top motion-picture companies which was going to make a movie about a firehouse in the Bronx. And he did, I must say with considerable bravery, the reconnaissance. He went up there by night and day. He was shown around by the firemen, he learned their drill, he was given police protection, but when they came to start shooting, the city quietly took the director and crew aside and told them it could not possibly guarantee their safety or ensure their lives, and the movie was abandoned. 

You go up to the South Bronx if you're foolish and you see an urban landscape which looks like the movie recreations of Atlanta after General Sherman's destruction of it in the Civil War. In fact you could say, without exaggeration, that a self-contained civil war has been going on in the Bronx for several years now. Every morning there are gutted buildings, every dawn the whine of an ambulance and, amazingly, every noon there are trucks and vans making deliveries to stores which push back the iron grilles and do business throughout the day. And, from time to time, very often in fact, you read of another grocer or liquor store or television dealer, who's been robbed and shot. 

On Wednesday night, the street people in the Bronx, moved in en masse and took, as one man said, what they have a right to have, food and liquor and jewels and bedding and always air-conditioners and stereo equipment and TV sets. All the photographs I've seen – and they've been the same three or four pictures in different papers – are of looting in the Bronx or Brooklyn. 

Now you can live in Manhattan, you can live in Brooklyn Heights, a prosperous and architecturally charming part of the city and never see or guess or dream of what life is like a mile away. I, myself, live in a comfortable, high, Fifth Avenue apartment that's only three streets south and two west of Puerto Ricans sleeping eight in a room. And ten blocks north of me, still on Fifth Avenue, are whole lines of shops whose fronts have been blasted or burned out – this is long before the blackout – and the street corners are draped with young blacks who've never had a job and never will. 

The New York blackout is evidently going to lead to an inquiry into the hazards of the very dicey power system that feeds New York City. Let's hope too that the ill wind, the thunderbolt that did the damage, blew some good in making the mayor, in the first place, and President Carter, in the second, think again about the crying need to do something radical about houses, jobs, education and the salvaging of a whole generation of young blacks in the jungles of Brooklyn, and Harlem, and the South Bronx.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.