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Sometime after three in the morning, as in section after section of the city signs of a world coming to life again registered in little whirrings and tickings, faint and then full, the editor of Life magazine noted: "Ralph Morse, who had taken the first pictures of the blinded city from a 2 8th-floor window, now began to take the last pictures from the same position. Slowly, during the next 1½ hours, the city came alive again, a blaze of lights here, a blaze there.... Morse's camera caught the radiant rebirth."

***

That morning, subway workers had to comb all 720 miles of track before the trains could run again, just to make sure no one had fallen and lay injured on the rails or was lost and wandering along the lines. Gas crews went from house to house to check the pilot lights—which were powered by electricity—in the stoves and boilers of every customer. The current of weary people who'd spent the night in the train stations flowed past people coming to work again.

Perhaps it had been hardest on the old and the sick, who'd had a nerve-wracking time. For a few, the dark was fatal: one man was found at the bottom of an elevator shaft, still clutching the nub of a doused candle. For others, it was a night unlike any other in its generous and quiet beauty. Among those who spent hours playing cards and drinking whiskey or making small talk in dark offices and subway cars with people they sometimes couldn't even see, some struck up a camaraderie they would never have had by any other light. "Everybody recognizes everybody else now," one woman said. "Although they've seen me for ten years and they've done nothing but help me up the stairs, now it's a tip of the hat and a 'good morning, Phyllis, how are you today?'"

The lost hours eventually faded into a strange dream full of quirky things, though there were moments that would be intensely remembered afterward—of lighting grease pencils to see by, of being given coffee and pastries by transit workers while waiting in a darkened subway car, of the sheen of the moonlight on the side of a skyscraper.

The blackout of 1965 spurred the first serious examination of the electric grid and its fragility. The subsequent Federal Power Commission report, besides advocating extensive changes to the grid system itself—ones that were hoped would both strengthen the grid and confine future outages—recommended backup energy supplies for airports, hospitals, elevators, gas stations, and radio and television stations; auxiliary lighting for stairways, exits, subway stations, and tunnels; subway evacuation and traffic control plans. But even with such measures in place, in July 1977, when a series of lightning strikes sent an enormous surge through New York City's power system, circuit breakers—which were designed to reset automatically—failed to close, and the city was plunged into darkness again.

Although in many ways this outage was similar to the one twelve years before—the stalled subways and traffic, the gouging, the camaraderie among people stuck together, the kindnesses (restaurants set up tables on the sidewalk and stayed open; a bagpiper played in Grand Central Station)—the city was a different place, the age a different age. Unemployment among young men in some of the black and Hispanic neighborhoods exceeded 40 percent. The night was hot and muggy—sweltering—and the pale sliver of a new moon set before the lights went out at 9:34 P.M., so there was no consoling light reflecting off the skyscrapers, nothing but the torch on the Statue of Liberty to relieve the blackness. Looting broke out in all boroughs of the city, and arsonists set more than a thousand blazes. After a few hours, thieves even began stealing from the looters in a free-for-all that continued beyond the twenty-five hours it took to restore power. Police arrested thousands, and hospitals were swamped with people cut by knives and glass. Three people died in the fires, and a looter was shot dead. In a number of hospitals, the emergency backup systems, which had been