BLACKOUT

 

 Every now and then we get to be a tiny particle of history, a grain of sand in the hourglass. I was thinking about this because I’ve recently been re-reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, in which the author describes his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

I guess I identify with this particular work of Orwell’s because, like me in Argentina, he sort of bungled his way into Spain as a volunteer soldier, with no real knowledge of Spanish politics or of what was going on and, keen observer that he was, learned on the fly. Orwell, who, unlike me, was already a rather well-known writer by then, went to Spain with only one thing in mind: to fight fascism. And Spain was the war front for that fight at the time, though it was growing clear that Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany would also have to be faced eventually.

Orwell

That was a lot like the way I entered the world of journalism in nineteen-seventies Argentina, with one and only one mission: to write for a living. I knew only vaguely about former strongman General Juan Domingo Perón and the all-pervading Peronist movement that had grown up around his personality. And less still about the varied and fragmented guerrilla and militant movements that had backed the push for Perón’s return from exile with armed actions, but each with a different political agenda. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was to get a crash course in the complexities of Spanish politics while serving as a frontline fighter with a leftist militia. For my part, I was to get a crash course in the equally (if not superlatively) complex politics of Argentina, while taking my first baby steps in a big city newsroom.

In nineteen-thirties Spain, Orwell would, after great suffering and sacrifice at the front, see infighting on the left practically turn into another civil war within the broader Spanish Civil War, Communist dominance in that fight, and the weakening of anarchist and socialist movements through attrition, persecution and execution to the point where the left as a whole lost ground to the fascists and permitted Francisco Franco to consolidate and install his absolute power over Spain for the next thirty-six years.

Lt.Gen. Juan D. Perón

In Argentina, I would witness Peron’s return after nearly eighteen years of exile in his friend Franco’s Spain, his utilization of the armed left to regain power, before re-embracing his fascist roots and sparking a violent purge of leftists in the armed Neo-Peronist and Marxist segments of his movement. He would then die, and the country would be plunged into tit for tat violence between the left and the right that would eventually lead to a military coup and more than seven years of state violence and repression. I would also witness and play a small role, as a newspaper editor, in a brief but bloody war between Argentina and Britain. All events that would be recorded in world history, and all also, almost accidentally, a part of my own personal history.

Anyway, I was thinking about all of that when I saw something the other day about the New York City blackout of 2003. Again, one of those historical events that you end up being a passive participant in against all odds. What were the chances that a native of Wapakoneta, Ohio, who had been an expat in Buenos Aires and Patagonia for three decades by that time, would end up in New York City, on an unplanned trip, precisely on August 14, 2003, when the lights went out?

My trip back home to Ohio prior to that date hadn’t been planned either. My mother had died on July 22^nd, and I was back for her funeral and then to help my sister and brother put the posthumous affairs of our parents, who had died six months apart, in order.

Dan Newland, Buenos Aires, 1978

The trip to New York was, despite the sadness of the circumstances, sort of a lark. I’d been invited by a friend and former Buenos Aires colleague to take a break and spend a few days with him and his wife in Manhattan. They had moved there in the nineties after he won a full master’s degree scholarship to the renowned Columbia University School of Journalism. Claudio, my friend and former office mate in Buenos Aires, had been one of only two recipients of the prestigious annual scholarship, and, savvy journalist that he was (is), had made immediate and influential contacts, which meant that, by the time he had his degree, he was also involved in several academic projects, including being a founder of the Hispanic New York project, and teaching part-time at Columbia and at the College of New Rochelle. His wife, Marcia, meanwhile, found intense and interesting work at a center for abused women and continued her studies for the psychology degree that she would eventually earn. Like me, who had gone to Buenos Aires “for a year” and ended up staying for twenty, Claudio and Marcia had remained in Manhattan and had been there a decade when I dropped in for a visit.

I had been in New Yok City several times before. Once with a New York area native with whom I was assigned to the Army Element of the Navy School of Music near Norfolk, Virginia. I greatly admired this guy and he was something of a fluke in the Army, because he’d been drafted in the last possible year that he was eligible (aged twenty-six) after earning his doctorate in liturgical music. Although I met and worked with some truly fine musicians and performers in the military, someone of his erudition and intensive formal schooling was a unique phenomenon.

Anyway, he organized a little three-day trip for several of us who could get passes, and we drove up to New York from Norfolk. This guy, Paul, hated driving so I, who loved driving, was behind the wheel for most of the trip in his sleek and lovely Olds 98.

The "Celestial Snooze"

Paul took all of us who had never been to the city, on a tour of his Manhattan: Union Seminary, where he had done part of his specialization studies; the Cathedral Church of Saint John’s the Divine, and the Church of the Heavenly Rest, which he familiarly referred to as “the Celestial Snooze”. But he also took us to see the sights, introduced us to a few of his New York friends, and invited us to go to several of his favorite haunts for drinks. Everywhere he tried to give us little local insights and anecdotes to take with us. Just one example, he said locals referred to the two tiers of the George Washington Bridge, which we all knew from the movies, as “George and Martha”. Martha, he said with a sly chuckle, was on the bottom.

Shortly after I got out of the Army, Paul invited my wife and me to go visit again, since he was also out of the service by this time and had a very classy post as choir director and organ master at a suburban Protestant church with a very exclusive congregation. One of the church’s benefactors provided Paul with a reconverted thoroughbred stable apartment on the family’s rural property in the suburbs.

Paul met us at the airport in the company of his partner, whom I immediately recognized as Gary, the Navy petty officer in charge of the music library at the Naval School of Music when both Paul and I had been there. In those days of don’t-ask-don’t-tell in the US military, this was the first time I realized that Paul was gay. I was glad that he and Gary seemed happy and that they were both out of the closet.

Paul’s mother was in Florida for the winter, and kind, civilized and generous as always, Paul lent me the keys to his mother’s car, and her apartment in the lovely area of Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, a short commute from New York City.  He also again served as our tour guide and invited us to an off-Broadway show as well.  

I went back to New York twice in the late seventies. Once when I was back in the States from Argentina on a visit and decided to go meet the assignment editors at ABC Radio News, for whom I was a part-time foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires. I remember that my appointment with them was in the evening and it was one of the coldest winters on record with a wind chill that night of something like minus twenty. My wife Virginia and I were eminently underdressed for it, she in a lovely dress, hose, princess-heel pumps and a short astrakhan coat, and I in a three-piece business suit, wingtip dress shoes and topcoat. Still, we decided to walk the four or five blocks from our hotel and by the time we got there we almost required treatment for hypothermia. We pretty much had Sixth Avenue to ourselves that evening, since everybody appeared to have fled to their homes early. It was eerie, like an episode of The Twilight Zone, with us portraying a couple of out-of-towners, who wake up in a New York City abandoned by human life.

The other time was also in the late-seventies and in winter, but a much nicer winter. One of those magical New York Christmastime winters, with the city swathed in snow, holiday season lights glittering everywhere, and people skating in front of Rockefeller Center. This time was all about fun, a six-state and Toronto road trip with Virginia and her brother Miguel. We went to museums, hung out in pubs and saw the sights, as well as visiting an Argentine friend and his family who were long-time New York City residents.

And then there had been a third time in the early nineties, when I was special projects editor for a major Argentine business magazine called Apertura. I had presented a special edition of our magazine at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Washington and had then taken the air shuttle to New York for an appointment with a colleague called Christian Frost, who was more or less Steve Forbes’s right-hand man. The idea was for me to negotiate with Frost for republication rights in Spanish on Forbes Magazine articles.

It was there that I learned that the building at 60 Fifth Avenue, where Forbes Magazine was headquartered, also housed a small museum on the ground floor where Malcolm Forbes’s extraordinary collection of Fabergé eggs was on display. I was also told that Steve Forbes had had a chalet built on the roof to stay in any time he didn’t want to leave the office building. I was never able to confirm this, however, so it may just be an urban legend. 

But I think what I remember best about that day was a wonderful lunch my wife and I shared at a soul food restaurant a short distance from the magazine’s offices. I recall a steaming platter of Southern-fried catfish, collard greens, black beans and rice, with plenty of cornbread and warm butter.

Anyway, as I say, my last trip to New York in 2003 was to visit Claudio and Marcia. Claudio and I had been close friends as well as workmates in Buenos Aires. They seemed genuinely glad to see me and were cordial and generous to a fault. They took me out to dine at their favorite places and on a walking tour of Greenwich Village, where Claudio proudly showed me the house where Henry James had once lived. He and I also visited Hispanic community literary and journalistic friends and contacts of his in different parts of Manhattan, and he gave me a guided tour of his alma mater, Columbia University.

They lived in Spanish Harlem, just off Broadway. Most of their neighbors were Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, but there was a mix of other ethnicities as well, including African Americans and, I noticed, a sprinkling of East Europeans. I couldn’t help wondering what my small-town friends in my hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, would say if I told them I’d been vacationing in Harlem. At least back then, I’m sure, they would have been shocked and thought me a bit of a hero, or at least less than prudent.

Personally, I have a theory that people are people wherever you go and there will always be “good” and “bad”, and it’s important to keep your wits about you and remain alert, but not to live in fear of any particular place or people. That philosophy permitted me to explore and get to know a lot of interesting places and people in my decades as a reporter.

East Harlem

But whenever I went to a new place, and especially places with folkloric identifications and reputations, the first thing I always had to overcome was my inherent small-town fear of the new and unknown. It’s a natural enough sentiment for anyone born and reared in a small town. If and until you venture out into the broader world, the only universe you know, if you’re from a town like mine, is a patch of urbanized countryside of completely manageable size and of homogenous population, where, most of the time, little happens to disturb the peace or the orderly march from one day to the next. And most people in such towns like it that way.

There was a time when I was growing up that New York City in general and Harlem and the Bronx in particular were almost universally portrayed as dangerous environs, which white, small-town Midwesterners should steer clear of because they might as well be sheep that local predators would attack and take down as soon as they crossed the imaginary line separating these places from the glittering tourist spots in the city. That was never entirely true—although the city has indeed seen some times that were more lawless than others—but especially not in 2003, which was just after Rudy Giuliani left his post as mayor of New York.

In recent times, I’ve been prompted repeatedly to shake my head and ask, “What the hell happened to you, Rudy?” Today Giuliani tends to be seen as a shady lawyer, conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump whipping boy. But back then, he was known across the political spectrum as “America’s Mayor.” And the city had arguably never been safer than on his watch.

This was mostly thanks to his having supported NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s adaptation of James Q. Wilson’s “Broken Windows” theory about crime and punishment. The theory being that ignoring minor offenses in crime-fighting only increased major crime, as felons, thinking enforcement was weak, would naturally conclude that they could get away with ever more serious offenses. Under Giuliani and Bratton, the NYPD started cracking down on small crimes and misdemeanors like vandalism, parking tickets, turnstile-jumping, soft-drug possession and aggressive panhandling, and, employing such policies as stop-question-and-frisk. This sent out a clear message that order would be maintained at every level in New York City.

Controversial though this policy might have been—and with good reason when it came to aspects like racial and social profiling—it would be hard to argue that it didn’t work. And people tended to breathe a greater sense of safety and security than at any other time in recent history. The relative residual benefits of that policy were still in effect when I was there in 2003.

That wasn’t the only factor, however. There was a different, friendlier attitude in general this time than the other times that I had been in the city, and I put that down to Nine-Eleven. It had only been a little less than two years by then since foreign terrorists had attacked America’s most iconic city, destroyed two equally iconic skyscrapers, and, in one fell swoop, murdered some three thousand New Yorkers. The incident had brought New Yorkers together, and in the aftermath, had given them a new sense of pride in the city and empathy with each other, and with visitors to their home town.

Claudio was quick to remind me, however, that it was far from idyllic. His neighborhood was still an area that fostered street-corner drug dealers, gangs and snitches. But it all seemed to me pretty much live-and-let-live on those streets of Harlem—a significant part of which today is being upgraded to “gentrification” status. Over Claudio’s protests that I shouldn’t take safety for granted in my self-guided walking tours, I said, “I haven’t felt the least bit scared or threatened anyplace I’ve gone, and I’ve been walking all over the place.”

“Yes,” he said. “But have you seen yourself? You’re huge! And dressed in your khakis, military vest and cap, you’re getting spared because they probably think you’re the meanest sonuvabitch who ever strolled out of Vietnam!”

I laughed, thanked him for his concern, and promptly ignored his advice. Back then, whenever I was in a new place for any length of time, I tried not to think of myself as a tourist, but as a new, if very temporary, resident. The fact that I was fluent in Spanish helped me blend into the Spanish Harlem landscape. And the way to get the feeling for a place, I knew, was to walk it. So that’s what I did when Marcia was at her job and Claudio was off doing what journalists do—chasing up contacts, doing interviews and following leads.

Columbia University, Broadway entrance

On these walks, I would usually make my route from their place down Broadway toward the Columbia campus which was about twenty-five blocks. Along the way, I would check out side-streets that looked interesting, or stop for Cuban coffee, or check out some quaint shop or bookstore. And if I felt like getting out of the New York summer heat for a while to have a rest, I would drop into Saint John’s the Divine to enjoy the cool quiet of its interior. Just sit in a pew at the back for a spell and chill. 

This had been my brief routine for a few days before August 14^th—good times with Claudio and Marcia when they were available and the rest of the time entertaining myself by getting a feel for the island of Manhattan. Claudio and I were just coming back from visiting the office of a friend of his and then taking a walk and stopping off for coffee when the blackout occurred. We had traveled by subway and were very lucky to have exited the underground tunnels only shortly before the power went out at a little after 4p.m.

There was almost immediately pandemonium in the traffic as the signals were snuffed out and crowds waiting for trains in the darkened subway tunnels started pouring out into the streets in search of some other form of transportation. It was suddenly gridlock all over town. The NYPD turned out fast, with cops showing up on practically every corner.

It was a hot afternoon, with temperatures peaking at ninety-one degrees. Near Claudio’s place, a harassed-looking rotund police sergeant in short sleeves, collar open and a big cigar jammed in one corner of his mouth, made a hole in the wandering crowds with his squad car, climbed out in the intersection and began energetically directing traffic in an attempt to break up the snarl that had formed there. Claudio’s neighborhood, where the sidewalks seemed always to be occupied by throngs of neighbors, was now jammed with pedestrians who had ventured out of their myriad apartments to see what was going on.

Reporters that we both were, instead of taking refuge in his apartment, we started roaming the barrio to observe the events. It didn’t take long for us to realize that this was some kind of major screw-up that wasn’t ending anytime soon. Claudio suggested that we should probably start finding a way to get to Marcia’s office a couple of miles away and accompany her home. I suggested that we’d better hoof it and hope for some kind of transportation along the way.

But suddenly, almost as if he had been called, a young Hispanic guy pulled up beside us in a mini-van and asked where we were headed. Claudio gave him the location and he said, “I’m going that way and still have room. I’ll take you.” I have to admit that I was stunned by such generosity and solidarity. But I was to see a lot of the same that evening. A New York where, at other times in its history, one might have almost expected rioters and looters to take advantage of the chaos, in this post-Nine-Eleven Manhattan, everybody seemed bent on being of whatever help they could be to each other.

We squeezed into the car with other passengers that the Good Samaritan had picked up along the way. We made it a full house. Everybody but me in the car was Hispanic. They fell quiet when I got in. I realized it was because they figured I was an English-speaker. I spoke up right away and said, “¡Buenas tardes a todos!” They answered, “¡Buenas tardes!” And then they resumed the conversation they had been having when Claudio and I got in, everyone talking about where he or she had been when the blackout started, and where they were trying to get to now.

Claudio and I told our story too, and said that we were trying to get to his wife’s office at the women’s center to accompany her home. There was a pretty young Puerto Rican woman sitting next to me in the backseat of the van. Every time I talked, I could feel her gaze fixed on the side of my face, observing me as I spoke.

People poured out of darkened subway tunnels

Eventually, the people in the rear of the van were dropped off, and then, a lady who had been riding in the passenger seat up front. It was now just the Good Samaritan carefully picking his way through the heavy traffic, with Claudio, the Puerto Rican woman and me in the backseat. For a time, none of us spoke. Then, apropos of nothing, the Puerto Rican woman leaned forward and addressed me. “You speak such excellent Spanish,” she said.

“Oh, ¡muchas gracias!” I said.

Then after a pause she said, “But you’re so white!”

Everybody laughed.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

With no other explanation, I said simply, “Ohio.”

She remained perplexed for the rest of the trip.

Commuters waiting to take the ferry to New Jersey

That evening at Claudio’s seemed almost festive. A friend of Marcia’s from work accompanied us home. She had a long commute—Long Island, I think—and decided to wait out the power outage in Manhattan. She was witty and funny. We all had drinks and snacks by candlelight and chatted, while their friend checked every so often by phone on commuter rail services. When transportation services began to be gradually brought back on line, she decided to leave for home.

What I then thought of as the New York City Blackout would actually become known as the Northeast Black of 2003. The outage spread between the Midwestern US and Northeastern states to Ontario Province in Canada. Most places were able to restore power by midnight and some areas were back on line by earlier in the evening. The New York subway system was, admirably, operating on a provisional basis by 8p.m. But full power wasn’t restored in New York and Toronto until two days later.

The outage was much more widespread than the famous blackout of 1965, which inspired such works as the musical Fly By Night and the book and film, Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? And it was second in scale only to a blackout that took place in Brazil in 1999. In a New York City still reeling from the Nine-Eleven terrorist attack, rumors were rife regarding the causes of the 2003 blackout, ranging from a terrorist attack on vital infrastructure to data interference by Russian or Chinese spies. The facts were much more mundane and it all started in my native Ohio, from which I had come for the visit. High-voltage lines that had slunk down into foliage, a resulting fire, a bug in an alarm system at FirstEnergy of Akron, which failed to warn operators that they needed to redistribute the power supply from overloaded lines, and suddenly, everything went dark.

A technicality that in human terms resulted in a major snafu, it became a date that left its mark on history. And, as fate would have it, like other times before, I just happened to be there.