A power outage crippled the heart of Manhattan just as Saturday night Broadway shows were set to go on, sending theater-goers spilling into siren-filled streets, knocking out Times Square’s towering electronic screens and bringing subway lines to a near halt.
Electricity was restored to customers and businesses in midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side by about midnight.
Con Edison chief executive John McAvoy said a problem at a substation caused the power failure at 6:47pm, affecting 73,000 customers for more than three hours along a 30-block stretch from Times Square to 72nd Street and Broadway, and spreading to Rockefeller Center.
Photo: AFP
McAvoy said the exact cause of the blackout would not be known until an investigation is completed.
The temperature was in the low 80s as the sun set, but not as steaming as Manhattan can get in July, challenging the city’s power grid.
A big cheer went up among Upper West Side residents when power flickered back on at about 10:30pm.
For hours before that, doormen stood with flashlights in the darkened entrances of upscale apartment buildings along Central Park West, directing residents to walk up flights of stairs to their apartments, with all elevators out.
Police directed traffic at intersections as pedestrians and bikes weaved through the dark.
The outage came on the anniversary of the 1977 New York City outage that left most of the city without power.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a statement that although no injuries were reported “the fact that it happened at all is unacceptable.”
He said the state Department of Public Service would investigate, adding that the outage posed a safety risk.
“You just can’t have a power outage of this magnitude in this city,” Cuomo said. “It is too dangerous, the potential for public safety risk and chaos is too high, we just can’t have a system that does that, it’s that simple at the end of the day.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio left the presidential campaign trail in Iowa to head home, although he tweeted emergency management updates and lauded New Yorkers for responding to the blackout “with that trademark NYC grit and toughness.”
He was in Waterloo, Iowa, at the time of the blackout, appearing alongside other Democratic presidential hopefuls at a “Passport to Victory” fundraiser.
Most Broadway musicals and plays canceled their Saturday evening shows, including Hadestown, which last month won the Tony Award for best musical.
Several cast members from the musical Come From Away held an impromptu performance in the street outside the theater for disappointed audience members.
The outage also hit Madison Square Garden, where Jennifer Lopez was performing Saturday night. Attendees said the concert went dark about 9:30pm in the middle of Lopez’s fourth song of the night. The arena was later evacuated.
At Penn Station, officials were using backup generators to keep the lights on.
When the lights went out early Saturday evening, thousands of people streamed out of darkened Manhattan buildings, crowding Broadway next to bumper-to-bumper traffic amid emergency vehicle sirens and honking car horns.
People in the neighborhood commonly known as Hell’s Kitchen began directing traffic themselves as stoplights and walking signs went dark.
Underground, the entire subway system was affected.
Maxwell Young, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said four Manhattan stations were closed to the public, but train operators had been able to manually change the signals and bring at least one car into stations so passengers could get off.
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