NEW YORK: Lights Out

“Who makes hu . . . humidity?” asks a little girl in a current subway advertisement. “Mother Nature,” answers the advertiser, New York City’s Consolidated Edison electric power company, “… heat, too! And when she combines them for any long stretch—whew! Many thousands of air conditioners run almost constantly, keeping Con Edison electric plants humming. This summer New Yorkers broke all records for the amount of electricity used in a single hour. But it’s our job to anticipate your needs . . .”

Con Ed’s ad took on dramatic meaning last week when seven big power feeder lines, strained beyond capacity by the extra demands of air conditioners and electric fans during one of New York’s worst heat waves, cut off, blacking out a five-square-mile slice of Manhattan with a population of 500,000. At about 3 p.m., the blackout shadows fell impartially across every social stratum in the nation’s most complex city: millionaires in air-cooled Park Avenue apartments sweated in the unaccustomed heat, while across Central Park, Puerto Rican kids swarmed from the tenements and splashed happily in the sluice of fire hydrants, which the cops thoughtfully turned on.

Bank vaults refused to lock. Long queues of customers logjammed the aisles of supermarkets behind silent cash registers, while clerks frantically tried to add up their checks with old-fashioned pencil and paper. When police ordered evacuation of the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind, 200 patients easily felt their way out of the pitch-black building, leading their helpless doctors and nurses.

Most seriously affected were the 13 hospitals in the blacked-out zone. Orderlies from Metropolitan Hospital rushed portable incubators carrying four premature babies 70 blocks downtown to Bellevue Hospital, where they were safely plugged in. Two nurses in Mt. Sinai Hospital kept an iron-lung patient alive by operating the respirator manually.

Yet, for all the problems caused by the. blackout, it brought at least one strange and encouraging result. The blacked-out area included some of New York’s toughest neighborhoods, where crime rates run high and the tensions of race and color flow easily into violence. Expecting the worst, Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy kept 2,000 day-shift cops on overtime duty, sent prowl cars with loudspeakers through the streets to warn people to stay at home. But Kennedy need not have bothered: during the 13 hours before all the lights came back on, the crime rate plunged to almost nothing. Said Tough Cop Kennedy: “The main reason why the unlighted streets were not turned into a dark and steaming jungle was the reaction of the community … In the dark all men were the same color. In the dark our fellow man was seen more clearly than in the normal light of a New York night.”