This might seem like a day late, but I just copied and pasted from my journal, date 8/14/13:
Ten years ago today, I was an intern-grunt working at Hock Films in New York City. We were housed in a high rise at the corner of West Houston Street and 7th Ave in lower Manhattan, just beyond the campus of NYU. It was the mid-afternoon, and I was busy logging digital footage for the ESPN series Streetball when all the sudden my computer screen went blank. At first, I thought it was just me, but as I wandered through the office, I noticed all the lights were out and all the computer screens were blank. There were about thirty of us working in that office, and we all thought that it was a temporary power-outage. But as phone calls were made and people from other offices started coming by to see what was going on, we realized that the entire building was out. After waiting about a half hour to see if power would come back, we were all instructed by the super to exit the building. Nineteen floors and a whole lot of stairs later, we finally spilled onto the 7th Avenue, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
The streets were crawling with people. Manhattan is usually busy, but this was busy on a whole new scale. It was as if a foot from the sky had kicked the New York anthill, and we scurried and scattered in every direction. It was a frantic, anxious, pulsating busy with thousands more people at our little street corner than usual. I looked at the traffic lights. They were dead. I looked at the building signs. They were dark. I looked at my cell phone. There was no signal. A brief moment of panic entered my heart as I recalled memories of the infamous 9/11 terrorist attack just two years prior. I wasn’t in New York when that happened, but most of the people around me on that street corner had been, and they had fear in their eyes.
I don’t remember how it came to
happen, but I soon found myself walking northbound on 6th Avenue, or
Avenue of the Americas toward Midtown.
My feet carried me farther and faster than any cab, bus, or train could;
the entire city was shut down. There was
congested traffic in every direction, and the intersections were manned by
ordinary citizens (I would have volunteered, but only a true New Yorker,
battle-born and refined by fire, could have so aptly barked orders at the angry
mobs, the frightened tourists, and the wily cabbies). Meanwhile, all public transportation was at a
rigid standstill. No buses. No trains.
No subways. Several people were
trapped in tunnels under the East and Harlem Rivers while they waited in
darkness for hours for power to bring them safely from the subway’s belly.I was living in Queens at the time, but thankfully, my sister’s boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband lived on the Upper East Side, and it was in his apartment five miles north of Hock Films that I found refuge for the next 72 hours. The people of New York transformed somewhat during those days from the hard-nosed, fast-paced, sharp-tongued sports freaks to an affable bunch of porch-partiers. People sat in the sun and swapped stories while their radios provided updates in the background. As for Mandy and Bryan and I, we read, played board games and suppressed bowel movements as best we could (plumbing was out, too) until our corner of the city was back on the grid, and lived to say that we survived the Blackout of 2003.
