Aug 21, 2003 02:42 AM GMT

Here's how it looked moving from Coney Island to the Bronx...

People stuck on the Wonder Wheel.

The woman who put her children on a bus that she couldn't fit on and cried "Take care of my babies!" as if she were placing children onto a lifeboat being dropped from the Titanic.

A woman crammed next to me on a crowded bus saying "I think there's a little more room in the back. Just a little room. If every one could just move a little bit. I think that there's just a little more room..."

Feeling like I was running against the New York City Marathon as I navigated through downtown Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, greeting people on the Brooklyn Bridge with a bullhorn, saying "Welcome back Brooklyn! I've been waiting for you all afternoon! Let's all have a big block party tonight. Pull out your barbecues, drink on the stoop, let's all go out tonight! Mrs. Marty is here, and she says hello also. Welcome back Brooklyn!"

Peeing on Soho.

Forty x15 buses lined up on Madison, preparing to take people back to Staten Island.

Lever House, fully lit from within, shining like a lantern in the darkness.

People hanging out of buses on Madison Avenue.

Finally catching a bus on Madison and 80th...five hours after leaving Coney Island and 10 miles since I had gotten off the last bus and started walking in Downtown Brooklyn.

A fight on the last bus that I took.

Walking across the Macombs Dam Bridge to the Bronx.

Yankee Stadium with the emergency lights on, arches and window highlighted.

A very dark walk through the neighborhood and feeling my way to my apartment by braille.

Taking a very cold shower at 10:30 and going to bed.

Waking up the next morning to find that the power was still off.

David Gratt, Bronx, NY

Aug 19, 2003 01:29 AM GMT

So here is what happens in a Detroit neighborhood, in 2003, when there's no electricity.

8:15 a.m.
You have no water, for one thing. Losing water is way worse than losing power, it turns out. I would've assumed otherwise, I think. But the power feeds creature comforts and mental needs, while the water takes care of basic health and life. I can't wash anything, even my hands if I get something funky on them. Even low-model germs can't be kept at bay. The cat food cans, for example: I can't rinse them out. And the uneaten food can't be flushed; it's in the garbage now. And it's ramping up to be 90 degrees and off-the-charts humid today. The radio guys (miraculously, I found batteries in the attic, probably from an inspired moment of smoke alarm safety never carried through) joked that locust and the plague are next.

11:00 a.m.
Walked to the corner and bought a case of water . The scene inside the dark store was restrained frenzy and very moviesque.

11:15 a.m.
Information is like crack, and I am jonesing. I'm annoyed that listening to my neighbors talking outside yields no information, because I understand only English. Mary Jane, across the street, speaks English, and I brought her two of my precious bottles of water. She lives alone and is kind of at a sixth-grade mentality level. I've seen posters on her living room walls and dried chunks of food on her shirts. She eats every meal at The Clock, which of course is closed, and I'm worried about her over there. For those of us non-cookers, closed restaurants are a very big deal.

2:35 p.m.
I bought a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of Polish bread that I picked out in the dark back aisles of the corner grocery. I wonder if Mary Jane has anything other than the tuna salad in her fridge that she doesn't want to believe won't be okay to eat when the power comes on. (It's been too long.) "But I spent so much money yesterday--you mean I have to throw all that food away?" There were tears in her eyes.

4:30 p.m.
After sweating to a genderless bloat all day, I've now put on a little makeup and biggened my hair. Also brushed my teeth with precious bottled water. Personally, my womanliness seems more marketable in these primitive conditions, when things like dirty fingernails matter less than pretty eyes or foofy hair.

6:10 p.m.
The birds are sounding pretty chipper this evening. Can they tell the wires they're sitting on are different today? I wonder. I'm also hungry. Jif has been a real disappoinment, let me tell you. Where's the salt? It's hard to breathe. The air is too thick, and mixed with panic.

9:45 p.m.
It's nighttime, and my neighborhood feels like a campground. We've been on our porches all day, a friendly family thanks to the shared boat we're in, but we can't see each other now, even across the street. Two houses have candles on their porches, and this light alone has half the block glowing orange. A group of scary teenagers walked by, and it turns out that a mere flashlight can be menancing; they beamed it at houses and inside cars. In this darkened situation, the guy behind the light has incredible power.

10:15 p.m.
Matt called me from I-696 & Woodward, a big-city intersection, and said it felt like being out in the country. All down Woodward, from Ferndale to Birmingham, was blackness. Except for the Chicken Shack! Glowing bright yellow, serving their generator-powered chicken to the gobs of humans flocked around their sole light like the bugs round the porchlight up north. Funny about the country feel of our city without power. I guess buildings alone don't create the feel of a city.

11:00 p.m.
The sky above Detroit is full of stars every night, but tonight we can see them, like our great-grandparents could. It's beautiful, and I feel good.

Amy P., Detroit, Michigan

Aug 18, 2003 06:48 PM GMT

I was on the phone with Con Edison when the power went out. There had been no electricity earlier on Leonard Street, we had a project going there, and I was trying to figure out when we could resume. The phone line cut out. The lights faded to a dull orange. Lights dead. No lights in the whole house. No way the power goes out when you're on the phone with ConEd. I jinxed us. No electricity at the work site. No phone, no computer here. I left to run some errands.

The traffic lights were dead. No backup generators for the traffic signals? Who is running the city? From a car radio I heard the power was out in the northeast. The whole northeast of Manhattan? No way. Just my luck. I had to send a crew home. Can't get any work done at the office. Everyone is out on the street using their cell phones. The post office is closed. I'm going to have to head downtown to send my mail. Traffic is getting scary. No one in the street to direct traffic. The car radios say it isn't terrorism. The power goes out on the upper east side and they're mentioning terrorism? That's extreme. The car radios say the power is out from Denver to Boston. No way. Power is out in the whole northeast of the country? It seemed impossible.

When I got back to the townhouse my boss was freaking out. She couldn't get through to her daughter who we thought could be stuck under ground on the 6 train. I walked across the street and waited on line outside Gristedes to get batteries for the radio. I tried to reach the bosses daughter. Everyone was walking by with pizza. The bars were filling up. The buses were running and I saw an MTA fuel truck pull beside a cross town buss and fill it up. Now that's good planning. Half an hour later I had batteries. My date for the evening called, not to see how I'm doing, but to make sure that we were still on for the movies. I hung up the phone on him.

As soon as I figured out that there was going to be no train to take me home, I called my cousin Sarah. I walked the six blocks to her place. It was dark. I had never seen Manhattan so dark before. Looking up, you could see the stars in between apartment buildings. Candles in windows. It was gorgeous. Everyone was out on the stoop. Cans of beer in hand. Lots of pizza. As we're getting ready for bed Sarah asked me if I heard bagpipes off in the distance. I did. We watched out the window as the piper circled the block with a following of people holding candles. The people on the stoops started clapping.

By midnight an uncle from the other side of the family made his way up from Wall Street with one of his colleagues. They had been drinking since 4:30 and they were sweaty from the walk. Smelly too.

The date ended up driving into the city to rescue me on Friday afternoon. We saw a bad movie.

Pam Nugent, stranded on the Upper East Side, no way back to Fort Montgomery, NY

Aug 18, 2003 06:33 PM GMT

We had a tense moment in the office highrise but no real panic. Heard alarms of people stuck in the elevators. Walked down 22 floors. I saw a coworker in high heels and gave her my loafers. (I had sneakers in my gym bag). Luckily we're both size 6 1/2. It took about an hour to walk home from E 40th to West 10th.

Amazing how the traffic flowed so smoothly without lights. Otherworldly to walk the streets at night in country road darkness, see candle picnics, hear people playing instruments, how tribal. People drumming & jumping over campfires in Tompkins. Some of my West Village neighbors had a candlelit card game going on the sidewalk. Like true New Yorkers, they had taped a handwritten sign to the stoop: FREE ADVICE.

Shannon Rothenberger, Manhattan, NY

Aug 18, 2003 12:02 AM GMT

I first heard about the blackout driving home from work, on the radio. Like many others, I guess, the thought of terrorism crossed my mind early on. I was relieved to find out that its origins were more likely based in the "natural" causes that plague electric service on ninety degree days. Some big old transformer somewhere went "pop", and off go the lights like dominos.

I called my girlfriend to tell her know the news. I did wonder if the blackout would spread further west. Detroit is only a five-hour drive! So, as I idled home, I did a mental inventory of my food on hand, etc. I'm in good shape. I have candles, a camping stove, and a cupboard that would keep me fed for a week, I guess. If push came to shove, the park across the street is full of semi-tame squirrels, fattened up by very generous humans, including myself. I let the thought of squirrel stew pass quickly, but by God, I was ready.

Power outages are a pain in the ass. The Chicago area was plagued by some real problems about five years ago. Entire chunks of the city would pop off, and always on a ninety-five degree day. I live in an old, old building, and the three-phase line in my alley was always getting knocked off. There were a couple times when I lost all my cold food, which made me grateful that I maintain a pretty sparse 'fridge. It got so bad that Mayor Daley really put the screws to Com Ed to update the system - since then it has held tight, but then, we have had pretty tame summers, too.

Oak Park, Illinois was a comfortable distance from the Blackout Capital, er, New York. At the risk of sounding like a rube, I really am fascinated by New York, and what goes on there. It is the only place I know that makes Chicago seem rather quaint when I come home. So when I finally got home and turned on the television I was not at all surprised to see the world once again focusing on New York. I think it was Times Square, to be specific. Honestly, do we care about Cleveland? Hell, I don't, and I was born there!

For better or worse, New Yorkers set the tone for so much of what goes on in America, and the world. Don't kid yourself - almost everyone wanted to see what would happen there. It made me proud to see how this great city handled another calamity.

Even in a power outage New York somehow makes you want to be there!

Dave Coulter, Oak Park, Illinois

Aug 17, 2003 11:49 PM GMT

Walking across the Williamsburg Bridge at sunset Thursday, along with tens of thousands of people, I felt as I were escaping Manhattan from a really slow Godzilla. You know, the monster is a few miles behind us and he's coming this way, but he's moving so slowly we've got plenty of time.

Ward Harkavy, New York, NY

Aug 17, 2003 03:31 AM GMT

When you live in a 19th century house, a blackout is not such a scary thing. We ate out on the front porch. We lit candles. I DJ'd on the Victrola for entertainment.

The power wasn't off for an inordinately long time - we're a little used to power outages anyway. More interesting was the sudden hailstorm the day before. Nearly all week, there has been at least one thunderstorm a day. There's one on right now.

Obviously, a blackout points out the usefulness of independent energy sources as opposed to centralized ones.

Henry Lowengard, Kingston, NY

Aug 16, 2003 03:22 AM GMT

I'm writing this at my parents' house, as my power at home has been out for around thirty hours now. The blackout hit while I was in my office, and we ran upstairs to cleanly shut down all the servers (their battery backups don't last very long). Over the next few hours, the emergency doors closed on their own, the security card readers stopped working, the phones died, the toilets ran out of water, and the fire alarm went off, prompting a visit from the Troy Fire Department. At this point, we were ordered to leave the building.

We ate (cold) dinner by candlelight, which is not as romantic as you'd like it to be when you've got no other choice (and when your dinner is donuts and pudding). My office was closed all day, and still is as of this writing, and rumors say that Troy may be down for "a couple days". Lisa's work, an ambulatory care center, was open for a half day on generator. The main hospital they're associated with is closed, however, as their generator exploded last night, requiring 100 patients to be evacuated.

Power has begun to trickle back on around the metro area, excluding me, of course. Gas stations have begun to reopen, with fistfights breaking out over line jumping. Detroit is starting to get their sewage treatment plants back online. The Aerosmith concert is canceled. But, in a real triumph of man over the elements, the Woodward Dream Cruise *will* continue.

Participants are being encouraged to bring their own food and gas.

Steve Bernard, Clarkston, MI, USA

Aug 15, 2003 07:57 PM GMT

Let's just say I never thought I'd have to walk over the 59th St. Bridge again! But trudge away I did. It's amazing the things you do when you're a single mom and your baby is in another borough! I was saddened by the people I saw driving with empty cars. I hoped that I would be a better person and stop to offer rides. But the highlight was walking along behind a father and his 4-year-old daughter riding atop his shoulders, singing Do a Deer and having a sidewalk full of people join in. I think both their rides went a little smoother.

Nancy Nisselbaum, Queens, NY

Aug 15, 2003 06:35 PM GMT

I was in J&R Music World ("Real New Yorkers know where to go," went the old jingle, "For records, tapes, and audio!") in Manhattan when the lights flickered and died. Fortunately, that's only about 200 feet from the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Say what you will about New Yorkers, we know how to act in a crisis: Everyone just looked around, saw the lights were out in all the buildings surrounding City Hall Park, and started trudging matter-of-factly across the bridge's wooden walkway.

(Apparently my early start home caused me to miss the spectacle, later in the evening, of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz standing at mid-bridge, shouting through a bullhorn, "Hello Brooklyn, you're home now!" Marty Markowitz was born to be Brooklyn Borough President.)

The mood on the streets was mostly good-natured, strangers trading hellos and gripes about how far they had yet to walk. Random volunteers directed traffic at major intersections, many decked out in orange vests scavenged from god-knows-where, doing a creditable job filling in for traffic signals often older than they were.

The neighborhood kids all stayed up late, too hot to sleep, hanging out on porches in the blackness. Toward midnight, a sudden glow lit the eastern sky. It took a moment to realize the power hadn't returned to Queens, or Long Island: it was just the moon, for one night unchallenged as the queen of the skies.

Neil deMause, Brooklyn, NY