In New York City, Bright Dawn for Some, Hangover for Others

In New York City, Bright Dawn for Some, Hangover for Others August 16, 2003 In New York City, Bright Dawn for Some, Hangover for Others By JANNY SCOTT he new day dawned for the fortunate in New York City like a found holiday in August: a mayor-mandated snow day, fully air-conditioned and blessed with a blazing blue sky. For the unlucky, alas, it was nothing of the sort. It was the maddening epilogue to a bad dream from which they could not seem to escape. It was a hangover, no coffee in sight. Morning came startlingly. Many New Yorkers woke to the happy hum of electrical appliances returning to life. Avenues were deserted and sun-baked, like boulevards in a medium-sized Southwestern city. But as the day wore on, normal life resumed, like the power. The city jerked back into the rhythms of a late-summer Friday. The weekend loomed, this time on too little sleep. "It's getting a bit old at the moment," said Sandy Colaccino, 35, who was visiting the city from Washington, D.C., when the power died and who ended up spending the night with her cousin from Italy on a scrap of cardboard outside Pennsylvania Station. Speaking for herself, her cousin and more than a few others, she said, "We just hope we don't spend another night on the street." All day, New York City was a checkerboard of the peculiar and the mundane. Greenwich Village, listless and carless for a time, felt like a real village; but nearby Varick Street, approaching the Holland Tunnel, was maddeningly jammed. Traffic on avenues without functioning stop lights wafted along as though under hypnosis; on adjacent avenues with working lights, trucks jockeyed and honked. For a while, New York was two places: one powered, one not. In the unpowered regions, it was Sunday on a long weekend; there was that benign feeling the city acquires when everyone leaves. On big downtown clocks, the time remained perpetually a little after 4 p.m. But along Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side, powered up, the sidewalks were thrumming. Every outdoor table was taken. People scarfed down cheeseburgers as though they had not seen food in days. Some rules of life were upended. Taxi drivers cruised the streets with their off-duty lights illuminated but their back seats full, liberated by their ostensible off-dutiness from the obligation to pick up anyone who waved. Drivers would pull up to the curb as though for a pickup, haggle over the destination and price, shake their heads, hit the accelerator and scud away. "Aren't you supposed to take me?" Kristy Avila, 26, a transaction manager for a mortgage trading firm newly transplanted from Chicago, pleaded with a driver she was failing to interest in taking her from Manhattan to her boyfriend's apartment in Queens. "Isn't this a time of need? Aren't people supposed to be good Samaritans?" The landscape was littered with reminders of a long, strange night that had seemed to oscillate along the spectrum between natural disaster and party. Stranded visitors still slumped bleary-eyed yesterday morning on the sidewalks. The stench of stale beer wafted from wastebaskets. In Times Square, television satellite trucks were stationed as though New Year's Eve had been rescheduled. Opportunistic capitalism, however, seemed relatively in check. "I'm surprised by the lack of entrepreneurial people out here trying to make a killing with camping equipment-made coffee," said Jesse Du Bey, 26, an investment banker who devoted part of his enforced leisure time to jogging shirtless from SoHo to Chelsea and back. In NoLIta, land of the velvet rope and the custom-made blue jeans, where one swank restaurant sells nothing but rice pudding, the briskest business in the morning was for an unstylish cup of joe. Even the espresso set found itself lined up on the sidewalk outside the relatively anonymous W.P.I. bakery in Chinatown. It had an edge over the surrounding Starbucks stores: gas heat. On Broadway in still powerless SoHo, a person walking with a cup of coffee could be stopped once per block by some bleary-eyed soul asking where he had found it. The answer was Buffa's, a regular-guy deli. People in line there gazed in awe as customers filed out with coffee. How did they do it? "I think it's a humongous gas-fired thing," said Greg Geisler, 49, a photographer. Sunbathers and picnickers settled in for the day in Central Park. Giselle Villa-Real and her friend Aimee Barnett activated the disaster plan they had cooked up on Sept. 11: Day 1, stay off the street. Day 2, sunbathe in the park. Unfurling a sheet in the Sheep Meadow, Ms. Barnett said: "It's always part of the plan. What else are you going to do? It's a gorgeous day." It was a day for telling stories, weaving the first draft of personal histories. Sitting at a Starbucks in Hoboken, N.J., yesterday, Marsha Reynolds, 26, a secretary from Kearny, N.J., recalled her night, which she had spent on the floor of an apartment on 57th Street in Manhattan that belonged to a friend of a friend. "Well, after I walked up from Penn Station and arrived at his place, there were about 10 other people, mostly acquaintances, already camped out," Ms. Reynolds said. "We ran out of wine around midnight but stayed up talking. It was a great experience. No one really knew each other, but we all spoke about families, politics, life and, of course, the blackout. "When we got power back on sometime after 6 a.m., someone turned on a fan for a nice breeze and we kept talking. No one immediately bolted for the door, because we were having a great bonding experience. I don't think anyone slept; and we had candlelight. When the sun came up, we blew out the candles but didn't bother with the lights." But for many, the thrill of the blackout had passed. People stood in line outside tiny groceries for a lackluster lunch of tuna fish and mayonnaise, if they were lucky. They went spelunking in dark aisles with votive candles. In the Spring Street Lounge, young professionals with an unexpected day off rubbed elbows with regulars so regular they did not seem to notice the power was out. It did not take long for old habits to creep back. On Broadway near 126th Street, cars pulled over for an ambulance to pass. Then a gypsy-cab driver veered out to try to jump the line as soon as the ambulance was gone. There were annoyances aplenty. New Yorkers with Time Warner digital cable complained that the Food Network and the Home Shopping Network were the closest things they could get to news. A Time Warner spokesman said the company was working on the problem. Customers who called to complain found themselves routed to a call center in Canada, chatting with fellow blackout survivors an almost inconceivable distance away. Linda Ayache, a pet sitter, began her rounds at 5:30 a.m., tending to housebound cats in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. Vacationing clients were calling in from the Jersey Shore and Cape Cod to check on their pets. The buildings were without water and power, the stairwells and hallways pitch black. By 10:30 a.m., Ms. Ayache had done seven climbs. "What I learned was that the Peter Cooper landings have 15 steps and Stuyvesant Town ones have seven," she said. "I'm totally in love with people who live on Main and One." The highest floor she had visited was the 12th. "I carried a couple of bottles of water for some of the cats," she said. Chris Connor, 28, of Commack, N.Y., who works in the compliance department of an investment bank, said the blackout had given him a new respect for the homeless. He had spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk outside 2 Penn Plaza. "I just put some newspaper down," he said. "I never thought I'd be sleeping there at night. I have a new appreciation for the homeless. It was rough." Lindsay Edouard, who lives in Larchmont, N.Y., and had passed the night hours walking around Manhattan with no place to sleep and no way to get home, stood in Grand Central Terminal the morning after soaked in sweat and puzzling over a map. "It was fantastic," Mr. Edouard said of his unexpected adventure. "There was a man walking around playing the bagpipes. Everyone was enjoying themselves." Then he added, "Now I want to get home.`