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Reviews in American History 32.2 (2004) 267-273



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Lights out

James Goodman.Blackout. New York: North Point Press, 2003. xiv + 254 pp. Maps and notes. $23.00.

New York City in the summer of 1977 resembled a scene from the last days of the Roman Empire. Economically, it was a disaster area without portfolio. Already buffeted by the effects of the recession that followed the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, New York had slid into a free fall in 1975, when commercial lenders cut off its access to credit, precipitating the worst fiscal crisis in its history. A helpless Mayor Abraham Beame ceded control of the city's budget to an Emergency Financial Control Board, which imposed severe service and spending cuts: laying off workers, freezing salaries, lowering public assistance levels, raising transit fares, deferring maintenance, closing hospitals, and shuttering libraries. Even with these desperate measures, New York's economy still leaked like a sieve, with private sector jobs disappearing at an even faster pace than their public counterparts. Unemployment shot up to levels not seen since the Great Depression, with rates in minority communities, as per the usual cruel ratio, two to three times higher than the city average. Stagflation, heretofore considered the proverbial economically impossible act, was also a bitter fact of life, carrying the virus of mounting inflation and interest rates into the municipal bloodstream.

Economic maladies brought social ills as well. Crime, on the rise since the mid-1960s, was spiraling to terrifying heights. Its public embodiment during the summer of 1977 was a nondescript postal worker named David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam, a stealth shooter who targeted young women in secluded areas. But with an understaffed, beleaguered police force practicing damage control, there was enough crime of the non-sensational variety, violent and otherwise, to make its occurrence almost quotidian, a part of the everyday fabric of life in the city. Broken windows, of both the literal and figurative variety, were everywhere. In the summer of 1977, in its own version of the impossible act, New York was poised both to explode and implode.

On the hot, sticky evening of Wednesday, July 13, yet another blow struck the wounded city, in the form of a massive power outage that cut off electricity through that night and well into the next day. City officials and [End Page 267] Consolidated Edison, the municipal utility, would spend the subsequent months attempting to find an explanation and to apportion the blame for what had gone wrong that evening. Predictably, Con Ed blamed an act of God—in this instance, lightning—and city officials blamed Con Ed. As James Goodman explains in Blackout, his account of the night of July 13, 1977 and its aftermath, each had a hand in it —natural calamity plus human error added up to disaster. But Goodman is less interested in what caused the blackout than in what the blackout caused. And explaining "what happened" scientifically, it turns out, is a much easier task than understanding human beings, and the myriad ways in which they behaved after the lights went out. Goodman shows us that we know less than we think we do about that behavior.

Our most enduring image of July 13, 1977, of course, is that of looting and violence, an apocalyptic holiday from law, order, and civility. Unlike the relatively benign blackout of November 1965, this night unleashed the base passions. In neighborhoods across the city, stores were ransacked, often picked clean, by rampaging mobs stealing everything from baby formula to stereos. In some instances, the looters used cars to pull the protective grillwork off storefronts, allowing passage through shattered window glass amid cacophonies of unanswered alarms. The thieves drew few distinctions between white and black merchants or even between the community-minded and the price gougers: all were fair game.1 The police, instructed not to shoot to protect property and hopelessly outnumbered in any event, were reduced to ineffectual damage control. Relatively few looters were arrested. Some, in displays of utter brazenness, walked into station houses carrying their...

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