Word: blackout
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last time Americans’ daily routines ground to a halt—the last time people flooded across bridges out of Manhattan—was after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The day after the blackout began, an editorial by The New York Times predicted that people caught without power “will remember where they were when the lights went out, and will tell one another that for a few minutes, they wondered whether terrorists had struck again.” The knowledge that the blackout was not the result of an attack spread quickly over...
...blackout also gave people a way to help each other in a time of only mild crisis—to ease an instance of hardship without heartache. In New York, as buses packed full of people and perspiration came to a stand-still in traffic, a man from a bakery stood along the road and offered drivers free bread through their windows. If people had fridges full of meat, they threw it on a grill and shared it with their neighbors. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg asked his constituents to give rides to others if they had extra space...
Like most people who have lived in the same place for a long time, New Yorkers believe they know their city pretty well. The blackout, however, allowed people to recognize in their prosaic settings a world they seldom see. The Queensboro Bridge did not actually change during the blackout, but I can promise you that it looks a lot different when you are crossing it on foot, along with thousands of other people. Along Fifty-Eighth Street, restaurant workers sat outside their eateries on chairs better suited for office work or dinner than for outdoor lounging. Firefighters sat outside their...
Over and over, I thought to myself, “You do not see that every day.” And you do not. Christopher M. Migliaccio, a resident of Queens, said that before the blackout, he could not remember seeing stars at night in New York City because of the light pollution. And everyone will have some unique recollection of their own to remind them that no matter how long they have lived in New York, they will never know it completely...
Maybe I did not look hard enough, but of the scores of people with whom I spoke about their blackout experience, none of them were angry. They had too many good reasons...