Really good essay! On the day of the blackout, I found out I had preeclampsia and had to go on bedrest.
I was a million pound pregnant woman walking up 9 flights of stairs sobbing and then i got into my hot, dark apartment and had to pee in a gallon jar all night (but it was mostly on my hand.) My baby was born 3 lbs very early, very sick. But just now he texted me from Chicago asking me to venmo him $35, so I guess it worked out!
In 2003, after a very difficult divorce, I found myself with little support from my friends and family. I was lucky enough to land a volunteer role in the NYC office of my Chappaqua neighbor, then-Senator Hillary Clinton. Although we had never met, her office was the only place I found respite.
One summer day, Hillary came in to the office to meet with the interns. I was invited to sit in on her presentation. We were in the middle of discussing the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when the lights in our conference room went out. It was the blackout of 2003. Trains were stalled all through Westchester, and there would be no Metro North service for the foreseeable future. How would I get home?
I summoned my courage and approached Huma Abedin, Hillary’s right hand.
“Is there any way I could get a lift to Chappaqua in the Senator’s van?” I asked.
Before I knew it, Hillary was welcoming me onboard. She cleared off the seat next to her to make room. As we drove north, I listened to her dialing in to a few radio shows to take interviews about the blackout. While she talked, the two of us shared her pack of gum. When the calls ended, Hillary turned to me, looked me in the eye, and asked what was going on in my life. She put all her attention on me. I opened up to her, telling her about my divorce. We chatted all the way up to Westchester.
A year later, she attended my daughter’s bat mitzvah.
Thank you for this beautiful story and memory! (And I remember those old WYNC offices well -- they were dingy but the views were PEAK.)
I was just in my second trimester and scheduled for the ultrasound the next day. I remember walking to the playground with my firstborn, noticing people coming out of their houses to kind of.... look around and see if they were the only ones without electricity. There was nothing much to do, so we just played with friends at the playground anyway. My husband walked home over the Brooklyn bridge, where Marty Markowicz waiting on the other side saying, "Welcome home! Welcome to Brooklyn!" as workers crossed over. We ate ice cream from the deli that was giving away pints because they were just going to melt anyway. My landlady and her family sat outside until late in the night, eating Entenmanns on lawn chairs. We didn't get water again until late the next day.
I had to wait another week to find out the sex of the baby, but we told my older daughter the next day that she was going to be a big sister. I have the greatest fondness for that particular blackout, when it felt like the city was a neighborhood.
Thanks for this. I do remember it vividly. I had called in sick and taken the train out to Long Beach because I'd just had a miscarriage and was mourning in the comfort of the ocean waves. Then the black out happened and I was stuck. The trains were electric so we were cut off from the city. I ended up banding together with a couple of other week-day solo beach goers who had their own private sadness and sleeping on the beach as things became increasingly chaotic that night around us. Happy ending-- my daughter is now 21. Thanks for sharing this piece and bringing back those memories!
I graduated with my MSW in 2003 and went to work at an EAP on Wall St. - a career change that ironically bought me back to the neighborhood of my first office job at Merrill Lynch 20 years earlier. It was traumatic to walk by the NYSE every day, guarded as it was with men in bullet proof gear and machine guns. Emerging from the subway on Broadway, navigating the then new post 9-11 landscape with its barriers and militia, I wound my way down Wall Street to my office at the foot of Wall and the East River. It was a hot day already.
I cannot express how deeply the dread hit me when the lights went out. Terror. Had we been attacked again? Flashbacks to watching the first tower go down from the upper floor of a midtown skyscraper on 6th Avenue. Chaos on the street. I saw a neighbor smashed against the door of a jammed bus to Brooklyn, envious he had made it and my coworker (and friend from grad school) were stuck in a sea of bodies jamming nearly every square inch of the street.
We made our way over the Brooklyn Bridge. Many people talk trash about NYers but all I saw on that bridge was compassion and kindness. The heat made some stumble but others quickly jumped in to help, offering water to those in need. Having grown up in Staten Island, lived in Manhattan for a couple of years and residing in Brooklyn at the time I had seen it all - twice. Every time there was a tragedy people pulled together. It was a comfort as we trudged across Brooklyn to my co-op in Kensington, thirsty and dripping in the August heat. The sun was just about down when we reached that stifling 3rd floor apartment.
The story goes on but I’ll end here with a coda about the day after. My spouse was in midtown in a building with its own power supply. I had to get him via car but there was still no power, no street lights. That ride was a story in itself.
One word describes New Yorkers: perseverance. In the face of outrageous odds New Yorkers always come out the other side, perhaps a bit more aware of how we are all the same and really do care about each other.
Let’s keep in mind that there were medical emergencies, childbirths, people fainting in the heat, and consider that none of that was as urgent as the milestone birthday party I was throwing myself. Picture an East Village Avenue B bar party more than say, a Mrs Dalloway affair or a city park BBQ.
It was August 15th, and apparently because I am a Leo, I was throwing a rager at Uncle Ming’s on 11th St and Avenue B.
There’s always the fear, what if everyone says yes but then only my parents and best friend show up? I’d sent out handmade invitations my graphic designer best friend helped me fashion and collected home addresses and employed stamps. A labor of optimism, if not love. Also impressive because it meant thinking ahead far enough that USPS could deliver.
I was expecting 40-50 people to arrive at the bar, which I’d reserved a portion of for the event, basically by saying, I’m bringing in a lot of customers can we sit on the couches? Uncle Ming or his manservant was agreeable and the plan was set.
By noon on the 15th, with no power at Uncle Ming’s, no ice, warm beer, no A/C, they said they would not be opening that night. I had to contact all the guests—individual phone calls—nobody texted and there certainly wasn’t email you could send from a phone, don't be ridiculous!) I left voicemails while sitting on the lobby floor, my Motorola flip phone (in a puffy stuffed duck case) plugged into a wall of a residential building with a generator, and report the party was off. Mrs. Dalloway probably would have just said fuck it all and glared at her copious flowers and closed the shutters.
No bash at Uncle Ming’s. No bash at all. My girlfriend tried valiantly, "Let's go to the best Thai restaurant, just the two of us and salvage this day!" The "best" was subjective at best, and it was maybe the worst satay and pad thai I'd ever encountered. She didn't give up and suggested a carriage ride through Central Park. I was like, you really don't know me. I don't think she wanted to follow slow-trotting horses as they shit before us either, but she had been desperate to find some glint of specialness.
We dejectedly trudged from the Middle West (far, nearly the Hudson!) to my girlfriend's place in the Middle East (far, the East River!) She was not a quitter and attempted one last idea, "How about some Ben and Jerry's from the bodega on my corner?" I considered how hard she was trying to do anything, and agreed, let's do it. I even smiled, maybe a little too resolutely but, I convinced myself: I will make this pint of ice cream be the one thing that will save this day!
The bodega's freezer housed containers of ice cream soup. I inquired how long ago had it fully melted, was it really a health code violation? No sale. Whether it was the last straw or the straw that broke the birthday camel's back, yes, Reader, I cried. I mean obviously.
The next day, the power was back on. I psyched myself up. No blackout of the Eastern Seaboard was going to take me down. I called all the people I'd invited and told them it's a do-over, we’re just going to pretend the 16th is the 15th and I hope you can still come. It was less a rager and more an 8 year old's birthday, but set in an East Village Bar. I think there were 7 family members, a few friends, my agents and a playwright they brought with them. I don't think Uncle Ming showed up. Less a milestone bash and more of a genteel time in a sweaty bar with yellow couches and the vibe of someone’s parents’s rec room overtaken by a band of burgeoning hipsters (the hot bartenders, not us).
Every birthday wish delivered by card, text, voicemail, email-- all said the same: HAPPY BIRTHDAY WINTER, I WISH YOU POWER!
I had just been laid off from my job as news editor at a well-known but now defunct marijuana magazine, and after several years of working one full-time and one part-time job, needed a break. So I spent the summer collecting unemployment and going to the beach a lot. That afternoon I was on the sand at Coney Island when I noticed that the Wonder Wheel had stopped rotating. A man near us who had a radio said there was a blackout.
"Nothing we can do about it," my friend said. "Let's smoke the rest of that joint and go back in the water."
We did, but eventually decided to go back, which was an ordeal: A jammed standing-room-only bus oozing up Ocean Parkway, and complete gridlock as we got to downtown Brooklyn. It took almost an hour to go three blocks. We got off about a mile from the Brooklyn Bridge and joined the thousands of people walking over. Sometime after nightfall, we'd reached the stop for the uptown Sixth Avenue bus in Lower Manhattan, but the buses didn't seem to be running. Cabs wanted $50 to go to Midtown. After close to an hour, a bus came.
I got off at 23rd Street. The crosstown bus came smoothly and empty. I prepared myself for having to climb 13 flights of stairs, but figured that once I got there, I had food that didn't need cooking and a battery-powered guitar amp.
When the bus arrived at my building complex, it greeted me with a sea of lights. We have our own power plant, not part of the Con Ed network, so we still had power.
Brian, your writing is beautiful, immersing us in that frightening blackout along with you and Sari.
I love how you and Sari celebrated your marriage! You both look adorable in your photos. Who but the two of you would celebrate your wedding on a “bridge.”
Such a lovely couple with many similar and fabulous joys in life. ❤️❤️
What an incredible story. A whole city goes dark, everything familiar suddenly feels strange, and somewhere in the middle of all that chaos two people are sitting on opposite sides of the same bonfire, each feeling alone, with absolutely no idea they are about to become part of each other’s lives.
That ending got me. Sometimes we look back at the worst, strangest, most inconvenient moments of our lives and discover that something beautiful was quietly beginning right in the middle of them.
And the fact that New York eventually took away your apartment but gave you your wife? That is one heck of an exchange rate.
Nice one, B! Didn't know you worked for WNYC in those days; I was in those studios a few times. I love that weird building — very Old New Yawk. And I love the meet-cute prequel!
I was in the East Village for the blackout, too, though we'd already moved upstate. SPIN magazine had hosted a rare staff outing — an afternoon boat ride around Manhattan — and when we docked, the power was out everywhere. Wound up stuck in town until the power grid lit up in Curry Hill the following afternoon, since I'd made the mistake of parking in a vertical garage that moved the cars on electric elevators. I recall sleeping (or trying to) on the roof a friend's apt building in Stuytown, because it was so damn hot and obviously no AC...Good times :)
Thanks Will. Yeah I was a freelance full time temp as they did things then. I got “fired” at the end of their fiscal year every year and rehired at the beginning of the next budget year. I was laid off on 9/10/2001 and skipped my NJT trip to Jersey City the next day. I would have been under the WTC the morning of 9/11…
Really good essay! On the day of the blackout, I found out I had preeclampsia and had to go on bedrest.
I was a million pound pregnant woman walking up 9 flights of stairs sobbing and then i got into my hot, dark apartment and had to pee in a gallon jar all night (but it was mostly on my hand.) My baby was born 3 lbs very early, very sick. But just now he texted me from Chicago asking me to venmo him $35, so I guess it worked out!
OMG, Julie. Lol. Thank goodness you had a gallon jar handy!
LOL!
In 2003, after a very difficult divorce, I found myself with little support from my friends and family. I was lucky enough to land a volunteer role in the NYC office of my Chappaqua neighbor, then-Senator Hillary Clinton. Although we had never met, her office was the only place I found respite.
One summer day, Hillary came in to the office to meet with the interns. I was invited to sit in on her presentation. We were in the middle of discussing the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when the lights in our conference room went out. It was the blackout of 2003. Trains were stalled all through Westchester, and there would be no Metro North service for the foreseeable future. How would I get home?
I summoned my courage and approached Huma Abedin, Hillary’s right hand.
“Is there any way I could get a lift to Chappaqua in the Senator’s van?” I asked.
Before I knew it, Hillary was welcoming me onboard. She cleared off the seat next to her to make room. As we drove north, I listened to her dialing in to a few radio shows to take interviews about the blackout. While she talked, the two of us shared her pack of gum. When the calls ended, Hillary turned to me, looked me in the eye, and asked what was going on in my life. She put all her attention on me. I opened up to her, telling her about my divorce. We chatted all the way up to Westchester.
A year later, she attended my daughter’s bat mitzvah.
What a story. Just proves what I've always known – Hillary is a good person with heart. Our loss as a nation that she didn't get to lead us.
wow! what a story. thanks for sharing!
Thank you for this beautiful story and memory! (And I remember those old WYNC offices well -- they were dingy but the views were PEAK.)
I was just in my second trimester and scheduled for the ultrasound the next day. I remember walking to the playground with my firstborn, noticing people coming out of their houses to kind of.... look around and see if they were the only ones without electricity. There was nothing much to do, so we just played with friends at the playground anyway. My husband walked home over the Brooklyn bridge, where Marty Markowicz waiting on the other side saying, "Welcome home! Welcome to Brooklyn!" as workers crossed over. We ate ice cream from the deli that was giving away pints because they were just going to melt anyway. My landlady and her family sat outside until late in the night, eating Entenmanns on lawn chairs. We didn't get water again until late the next day.
I had to wait another week to find out the sex of the baby, but we told my older daughter the next day that she was going to be a big sister. I have the greatest fondness for that particular blackout, when it felt like the city was a neighborhood.
Love this memory, Mary Elizabeth. 💕
Thanks for this. I do remember it vividly. I had called in sick and taken the train out to Long Beach because I'd just had a miscarriage and was mourning in the comfort of the ocean waves. Then the black out happened and I was stuck. The trains were electric so we were cut off from the city. I ended up banding together with a couple of other week-day solo beach goers who had their own private sadness and sleeping on the beach as things became increasingly chaotic that night around us. Happy ending-- my daughter is now 21. Thanks for sharing this piece and bringing back those memories!
I graduated with my MSW in 2003 and went to work at an EAP on Wall St. - a career change that ironically bought me back to the neighborhood of my first office job at Merrill Lynch 20 years earlier. It was traumatic to walk by the NYSE every day, guarded as it was with men in bullet proof gear and machine guns. Emerging from the subway on Broadway, navigating the then new post 9-11 landscape with its barriers and militia, I wound my way down Wall Street to my office at the foot of Wall and the East River. It was a hot day already.
I cannot express how deeply the dread hit me when the lights went out. Terror. Had we been attacked again? Flashbacks to watching the first tower go down from the upper floor of a midtown skyscraper on 6th Avenue. Chaos on the street. I saw a neighbor smashed against the door of a jammed bus to Brooklyn, envious he had made it and my coworker (and friend from grad school) were stuck in a sea of bodies jamming nearly every square inch of the street.
We made our way over the Brooklyn Bridge. Many people talk trash about NYers but all I saw on that bridge was compassion and kindness. The heat made some stumble but others quickly jumped in to help, offering water to those in need. Having grown up in Staten Island, lived in Manhattan for a couple of years and residing in Brooklyn at the time I had seen it all - twice. Every time there was a tragedy people pulled together. It was a comfort as we trudged across Brooklyn to my co-op in Kensington, thirsty and dripping in the August heat. The sun was just about down when we reached that stifling 3rd floor apartment.
The story goes on but I’ll end here with a coda about the day after. My spouse was in midtown in a building with its own power supply. I had to get him via car but there was still no power, no street lights. That ride was a story in itself.
One word describes New Yorkers: perseverance. In the face of outrageous odds New Yorkers always come out the other side, perhaps a bit more aware of how we are all the same and really do care about each other.
.
Let’s keep in mind that there were medical emergencies, childbirths, people fainting in the heat, and consider that none of that was as urgent as the milestone birthday party I was throwing myself. Picture an East Village Avenue B bar party more than say, a Mrs Dalloway affair or a city park BBQ.
It was August 15th, and apparently because I am a Leo, I was throwing a rager at Uncle Ming’s on 11th St and Avenue B.
There’s always the fear, what if everyone says yes but then only my parents and best friend show up? I’d sent out handmade invitations my graphic designer best friend helped me fashion and collected home addresses and employed stamps. A labor of optimism, if not love. Also impressive because it meant thinking ahead far enough that USPS could deliver.
I was expecting 40-50 people to arrive at the bar, which I’d reserved a portion of for the event, basically by saying, I’m bringing in a lot of customers can we sit on the couches? Uncle Ming or his manservant was agreeable and the plan was set.
By noon on the 15th, with no power at Uncle Ming’s, no ice, warm beer, no A/C, they said they would not be opening that night. I had to contact all the guests—individual phone calls—nobody texted and there certainly wasn’t email you could send from a phone, don't be ridiculous!) I left voicemails while sitting on the lobby floor, my Motorola flip phone (in a puffy stuffed duck case) plugged into a wall of a residential building with a generator, and report the party was off. Mrs. Dalloway probably would have just said fuck it all and glared at her copious flowers and closed the shutters.
No bash at Uncle Ming’s. No bash at all. My girlfriend tried valiantly, "Let's go to the best Thai restaurant, just the two of us and salvage this day!" The "best" was subjective at best, and it was maybe the worst satay and pad thai I'd ever encountered. She didn't give up and suggested a carriage ride through Central Park. I was like, you really don't know me. I don't think she wanted to follow slow-trotting horses as they shit before us either, but she had been desperate to find some glint of specialness.
We dejectedly trudged from the Middle West (far, nearly the Hudson!) to my girlfriend's place in the Middle East (far, the East River!) She was not a quitter and attempted one last idea, "How about some Ben and Jerry's from the bodega on my corner?" I considered how hard she was trying to do anything, and agreed, let's do it. I even smiled, maybe a little too resolutely but, I convinced myself: I will make this pint of ice cream be the one thing that will save this day!
The bodega's freezer housed containers of ice cream soup. I inquired how long ago had it fully melted, was it really a health code violation? No sale. Whether it was the last straw or the straw that broke the birthday camel's back, yes, Reader, I cried. I mean obviously.
The next day, the power was back on. I psyched myself up. No blackout of the Eastern Seaboard was going to take me down. I called all the people I'd invited and told them it's a do-over, we’re just going to pretend the 16th is the 15th and I hope you can still come. It was less a rager and more an 8 year old's birthday, but set in an East Village Bar. I think there were 7 family members, a few friends, my agents and a playwright they brought with them. I don't think Uncle Ming showed up. Less a milestone bash and more of a genteel time in a sweaty bar with yellow couches and the vibe of someone’s parents’s rec room overtaken by a band of burgeoning hipsters (the hot bartenders, not us).
Every birthday wish delivered by card, text, voicemail, email-- all said the same: HAPPY BIRTHDAY WINTER, I WISH YOU POWER!
Delightful story and photos. Happy kinda sorta anniversary, Brian and Sari.
Thanks, Rona. <3
we live in BC Canada and were @ our cottage in Muskoka Ontario with our 3 little ones
quite a remote area
we were without power ( which runs our plumbing etc) for 3 days
we listened to CBC on our emergency radio
we thought the world was ending
it was very unsettling and we were concerned about the safety for our American neighbours
This is the sweetest ending after the harrowing walk home.
Brian, this is such a beautiful story! Gorgeous writing!
Mameh
Thanks Mameh!
I only wish my mom had made it to the age of Substack….
You are very cute, Mom. <3
I had just been laid off from my job as news editor at a well-known but now defunct marijuana magazine, and after several years of working one full-time and one part-time job, needed a break. So I spent the summer collecting unemployment and going to the beach a lot. That afternoon I was on the sand at Coney Island when I noticed that the Wonder Wheel had stopped rotating. A man near us who had a radio said there was a blackout.
"Nothing we can do about it," my friend said. "Let's smoke the rest of that joint and go back in the water."
We did, but eventually decided to go back, which was an ordeal: A jammed standing-room-only bus oozing up Ocean Parkway, and complete gridlock as we got to downtown Brooklyn. It took almost an hour to go three blocks. We got off about a mile from the Brooklyn Bridge and joined the thousands of people walking over. Sometime after nightfall, we'd reached the stop for the uptown Sixth Avenue bus in Lower Manhattan, but the buses didn't seem to be running. Cabs wanted $50 to go to Midtown. After close to an hour, a bus came.
I got off at 23rd Street. The crosstown bus came smoothly and empty. I prepared myself for having to climb 13 flights of stairs, but figured that once I got there, I had food that didn't need cooking and a battery-powered guitar amp.
When the bus arrived at my building complex, it greeted me with a sea of lights. We have our own power plant, not part of the Con Ed network, so we still had power.
Brian, your writing is beautiful, immersing us in that frightening blackout along with you and Sari.
I love how you and Sari celebrated your marriage! You both look adorable in your photos. Who but the two of you would celebrate your wedding on a “bridge.”
Such a lovely couple with many similar and fabulous joys in life. ❤️❤️
Thank you, Bella! ❤️
It’s a blessing when we can rise above a minor or major disaster to unite and find something to celebrate
What an incredible story. A whole city goes dark, everything familiar suddenly feels strange, and somewhere in the middle of all that chaos two people are sitting on opposite sides of the same bonfire, each feeling alone, with absolutely no idea they are about to become part of each other’s lives.
That ending got me. Sometimes we look back at the worst, strangest, most inconvenient moments of our lives and discover that something beautiful was quietly beginning right in the middle of them.
And the fact that New York eventually took away your apartment but gave you your wife? That is one heck of an exchange rate.
Beautifully written.
It's fun to think about, but I learned that the stats don't back up that more babies were conceived that night...
Nice one, B! Didn't know you worked for WNYC in those days; I was in those studios a few times. I love that weird building — very Old New Yawk. And I love the meet-cute prequel!
I was in the East Village for the blackout, too, though we'd already moved upstate. SPIN magazine had hosted a rare staff outing — an afternoon boat ride around Manhattan — and when we docked, the power was out everywhere. Wound up stuck in town until the power grid lit up in Curry Hill the following afternoon, since I'd made the mistake of parking in a vertical garage that moved the cars on electric elevators. I recall sleeping (or trying to) on the roof a friend's apt building in Stuytown, because it was so damn hot and obviously no AC...Good times :)
Thanks Will. Yeah I was a freelance full time temp as they did things then. I got “fired” at the end of their fiscal year every year and rehired at the beginning of the next budget year. I was laid off on 9/10/2001 and skipped my NJT trip to Jersey City the next day. I would have been under the WTC the morning of 9/11…
Lucky me that you weren't. <3
Whew ... a series of close calls and near-misses, this life :)