Not everyone was enamored with the new SoHo. Some thought its monolithic identity contradicted the melting pot ethos of the city. The sculptor Donald Judd, who had bought an entire cast-iron building on Spring Street for sixty-eight thousand dollars in 1968, hated being surrounded by so many artists. “I don’t want to bump into everyone I know on the streets,” he complained in 1974. “I want to live in the real world.”
This quasi-socialist bohemia wasn’t destined to last anyway. In 1974, New York magazine named SoHo “The Most Exciting Place to Live in the City.” “[A]lthough the outsides may suggest that the insides look like Ratso Rizzo’s place in Midnight Cowboy, don’t be deceived by the externals,” the magazine reported, “For behind SoHo’s industrial detritus, behind its rusty fire escapes, behind the Mr.-Otis-regrets condition of its elevators, and at the top of its Les Misérables stairways hides a robust middle-class materialism.”
By 1977 the law that stipulated that all loft dwellers be certified artists was being blatantly ignored. New Yorkers with no connection to the local artistic community save for a shared taste for arched windows, exposed brick, and lots of cheap square footage were moving to the neighborhood. At the same time, a number of SoHo’s once-struggling artists were getting famous, and the dealers who bought and sold their work were getting rich. (Those who were getting neither rich nor famous grew bitter. One put epoxy in the keyholes of all the galleries. Another spray-painted “SoHo Sucks, Bring Back the Trucks” around the neighborhood.)
Avant-garde jazz—loft jazz, as it had become known—was also in full bloom now. The rent parties and stripped-down performance spaces of the early seventies had given way to clubs and concerts. The SoHo Weekly News had been covering the scene for years, but by the end of the summer even Newsweek had taken note: “One of the many places jazz has found a new home is a sleazy area in lower Manhattan, where the phenomenon called loft jazz flourishes.”
In September 1977 a former New York City public school teacher named Giorgio DeLuca unveiled SoHo’s first supermarket. (Andy Warhol was among those who signed the guest book on its opening day.) For years people had been calling SoHo the new Montparnasse. The twenty-six-hundred-square-foot Dean & DeLuca would be its fromagerie, patisserie, and boulangerie all rolled into one. In later years the proud pioneers who had settled—or resettled anyway—this urban frontier would point darkly to the day, identifying it as the tipping point, the moment when their beloved neighborhood made the irreversible transition from scruffy artists’ colony to theme park for the taste-fetishizing upwardly mobile.
By 1977, there was plenty to complain about. The average rent for a residential loft was climbing fast. The metamorphosis of SoHo had no doubt hastened the departure of numerous blue-collar jobs, and it was certainly doing nothing for those most in need, the city’s poor. Some critics were even starting to wonder if the neighborhood was good for art. Writing in 1978 in the now-defunct journal New York Affairs, Carter Ratcliff accused SoHo’s opportunistic artists and trendy galleries, which by then numbered nearly one hundred, of trivializing the “modernist struggle.”
Yet it was hard not to be encouraged by the revival of SoHo. It wasn’t simply the creation of a new tax base, nor was it the reaffirmation of the value of New York’s most precious resource, real estate. As they gradually filled with people swimming against the suburban tides, these buildings that had once stood as ghostly reminders of the disappearance of manufacturing from New York were now being transformed into monuments to the city’s resilience, powerfully evoking the past even as they hinted at a postindustrial future.
PART TWO
27.
New York makes one think about the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn’t come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.
SAUL BELLOW, MR. SAMMLER’S PLANET
WILLIAM Jurith left for work in the early afternoon of Wednesday, July 13. He was supposed to have the day off, but when a colleague told him that he needed to take care of some personal business, Jurith, who was putting his son through law school, volunteered to pick up his colleague’s four-to-midnight shift.
Jurith was a system operator for Consolidated Edison. He had no training as an engineer, though he had done a tour as a radar technician during World War II. After the war he settled in Brooklyn, married, and took an entry-level job at Con Ed. He and his wife raised their family in a green clapboard house on a tree-lined street in the working-class enclave of Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. Jurith had been with Con Ed for twenty-nine of his fifty-six years, climbing steadily through the ranks, from emergency foreman to district operator to power dispatcher. Two years earlier he got the big bump to system operator.
The system he presided over for eight hours a day, five days a week, was the most complicated one in the world. When the Edison Electric Illuminating Company opened for business in 1882, it had the capacity to generate enough power to light four hundred lamps within one square mile in lower Manhattan. Now the company served all five boroughs and most of Westchester County, a total of nine million people.
The city’s stringent clean-air regulations made it prohibitively expensive to depend on local generators that were required to burn costly low-sulfur oil rather than cheaper alternatives like coal. So Con Ed built plants outside the city and bought power from neighboring states rather than make it. Most of that power came from the north—from the New England utilities, from a variety of generators upstate, and from hydroelectric plants in Niagara Falls that produced power on the cheap via kinetic energy. To import this power into the city, Con Ed relied on an intricate network of highways, more than a hundred thousand miles of cable, enough to circle the globe four times.
The lines ran down through Westchester County in a densely packed, narrow corridor before diving underground and joining Con Ed’s web of high-voltage underground arteries. The service wasn’t always perfect. Power failures, or at least the fear of them, had been a rite of summer in New York since 1965. In the late sixties and early seventies, as Con Ed lost a number of transmission lines to age, localized brownouts were commonplace. In more recent years, however, the company had undertaken an ambitious cable replacement program. In 1975 the city was brownout-free for the first time since 1963. Nineteen-seventy-six made it two in a row.
The system’s first major test of ’77 was now on its way. A blanket of hot, muggy weather was descending on the city like a giant steam iron. The arrival of a heat wave imminent, Con Edison’s chairman, Charles Luce, went on a Sunday morning talk show to discuss his company’s preparedness. Luce, a tall, slender Wisconsin native who wore a built-up left shoe to compensate for a limp, guaranteed New York that there would be no outages.
Jurith was stationed in the control room of Con Edison’s Energy Control Center, a bleak, windowless building at Sixty-fifth Street and West End Avenue. The control room, the nerve center of the company’s sprawling power system, was on the top floor. The unofficial dress code was short-sleeve dress shirts and short, wide monochromatic ties. Many of the various operators, monitors, and power dispatchers wore their hair neatly parted on the side and guzzled coffee with nondairy creamer and sugar.
The system operator sat at the front of the room. His job was similar to that of an air traffic controller, only instead of conducting planes through an intricate grid of highways in the sky, he conducted electricity through an intricate grid of highways underground.
Covering the wall facing him was a huge mechanized map known as the mimic board. The entire Con Ed grid was represented here. Meters indicated how much energy each generator was producing and how much power was flowing through every feeder. If there was a disturbance somewhere along the system and a circuit breaker was tripped, the corresponding line on the mimic board flashed green, indicating the line was open and thus not conducting electricity. When the line reclosed and resumed conducting power—generally within seconds—the corresponding line on the mimic board returned to red. In ot
her words, in the inverted language of electrical systems, green suggested trouble, while red meant everything was okay.
There was a color monitor and keyboard on the SO’s desk that provided him with more detailed information, including schematic diagrams for each generator, transmission line, and substation. To the left of that was his voltage reduction panel, a series of dials that allowed him to lower the voltage emanating from any given power station by 3, 5, or 8 percent. He used this panel rarely. Even when he did, voltage reductions nearly always went undetected by Con Ed customers.
Finally, to the right of the monitor was another panel, one that system operators prayed they’d never have to use. (Just the thought of it caused the sweat stains under the armpits of their shirts to grow.) This was the manual load-shedding equipment, thirty-nine buttons protected by plastic caps, one for each zone in the Con Ed grid. When the SO activated this panel—and not one ever had—it would mean only one thing: Some customers were about to lose power.
Energy consumption traditionally spiked during the dog days of summer. Demand peaked in the middle of the afternoon, when air conditioners were rumbling all over the city. On a hot summer day New York might burn through four times as much power as it would on an average spring afternoon.
Unlike gas, electricity can’t be stored; it has to be used as it is generated. So as a day got hotter, the system operator had to anticipate the growing demand for power and find the most efficient ways to meet it. That meant bringing up generation with the help of gas turbines and special reserve generators known as peaking units, as well as contracting to buy additional power on the spot market.
On July 13 demand peaked at 7,264 megawatts at 4 p.m., just as Jurith was settling into his chair for the night ahead. The city’s power needs would lessen from here. He’d spend most of his shift studying his monitor and easing off and shutting down generators, keeping pace with the demand curve as it slid south. The forecast for the evening was for continued heat and humidity, but no thunderstorms. Jurith figured he was home free.
By 7 p.m. all his supervisors, including the chief system operator, had called it a day. An hour later Jurith sent home most of the so-called turbine boys who manned Con Ed’s four gas-powered turbine sites in the city. These turbines were primarily for peak-hour usage; they were expensive to operate and produced a relatively small amount of power.
At 8:37 p.m., Jurith looked up at the mimic board and saw green. Two circuit breakers had tripped in Westchester County, and a pair of high-voltage transmission lines had opened. There must have been a disturbance somewhere. Jurith stared at the board for a second or two, waiting for the lines to return to red, the sign that the short had passed and the cables had reclosed. They were still green. He blinked. A third indicator lamp in the same region had joined them.
The open lines led in and out of Buchanan South, a substation in a small town on the Hudson. Substations housed massive transformers that were required to convert the high-voltage electricity produced by generators into the low-voltage electricity used in offices and homes. In Buchanan South’s case, that generator was Indian Point 3, Con Ed’s behemoth nuclear reactor thirty-five miles north of midtown Manhattan. Built in the early sixties on the site of a former amusement park, Indian Point had been one of the world’s first commercial nuclear reactors.
A horn blared. Jurith glanced at the mimic board. A needle was falling like the pressure gauge on a deflating tire—nine hundred megawatts, eight hundred megawatts, seven hundred megawatts—all the way to zero. It was Indian Point, his “nukie.”
Either the mimic board was malfunctioning, or something was very, very wrong. Jurith punched a button on his communication console and was patched right through to Westchester’s district operator. “Yeah, Bill,” Westchester confirmed, “it looks like we lost the entire south bus [Buchanan], including Unit 3 [Indian Point] … The station operator tells me he saw lightning.”
Behind Jurith, a teleprinter was spitting out a status report: W97 OOS. W98 OOS. Y88 OOS. INDIAN POINT 3 OOS. Three high-voltage transmission lines and Con Ed’s most heavily loaded generator were all OOS—out of service.
It later emerged that the culprit was in fact a bolt of lightning at Buchanan South. Substations were designed to ground lightning strokes, but this one had slipped through. A short occurred, triggering the first two sets of circuit breakers.
The breakers were supposed to open the affected lines and isolate the problem until the fault dissipated. The fault did dissipate in less than a second, but the circuit breakers never reclosed to allow the flow of power to resume. In one case the problem was a loose locking nut; in the other, a critical circuit that had been removed for an upgrade had not yet been replaced. The third line tripped out when a protective timing device misread the disturbance, failing to recognize that the first two lines had already isolated the flash of lightning. Without an outlet for its power, Indian Point 3 had automatically gone into shutdown.
Electrical systems are designed so that if one generator goes down, another will pick up the slack. Sure enough, emergency power promptly started coursing down from New England. The trouble was, with three transmission lines out of service, the remaining lines were going to be shouldering a much bigger energy burden than they were built to handle.
At 8:40 p.m. a high-pitched alarm sounded on Jurith’s desktop monitor. A key feeder connecting the Con Ed system to New England was exceeding its limit by a hundred megawatts. If the line wasn’t deloaded right away, it was going to fry.
28.
ONE hundred and sixty miles north, in Guilderland, New York, home of the New York Power Pool, William Kennedy, a burly Irishman, was watching the scene unfold on his own mimic board, a twenty-foot-high, eighty-foot-wide map of New York State’s entire power grid. Kennedy was the senior dispatcher for the power pool, the state’s energy clearinghouse, an oversight body created for exactly such moments.
Kennedy called the Con Ed control room to make sure that they were “getting their dogs moving,” revving up all its reserve generators. Every day Con Ed was required to report its emergency generating capacity to the power pool, so Kennedy knew exactly how much the utility had or at least how much it claimed to have. There was plenty of megawattage to offset the loss of Indian Point 3. It just might take a little while to get the backup generators up and running.
Laid-off cops protest at a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge in July 1975.
(NEAL BOENZI/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Mayor Beame uses a visual aid as he explains the state of the city’s finances in early 1977.
(NEAL BOENZI/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Boats crowd into the New York Harbor for the tall ships parade on July 4.1976.
(NEAL BOENZI/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Casey Stengel gives Billy Martin a big hug in September 1952 after Martin’s RBI-single in the 11th inning helped clinch the pennant for the Yankees. (BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Reggie Jackson after being selected second in the 1966 amateur draft. The young Reggie wouldn’t say how much he expected to sign for, though he did say, “It’s way up there.” (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Reggie modeling his custom-made $7,000 fur coat the day after signing with the Yankees in December 1976. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Clay Felker (right) and Rupert Murdoch together in the Hamptons before their relationship soured. (JANIE EISENBERG)
Reggie takes a big cut on opening day in April . (ROBERT WALKER/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
New York sided with Thurman Munson after Reggie criticized his leadership in an article in Sport magazine. (JAMES HAMILTON)
During the summer of 1977, Jimmy Breslin became New York’s most famous newspaper columnist since Walter Winchell. (JANIE EISENBERG)
Bella Abzug peering over her half-rimmed glasses during the summer of 1977. (NEAL BOENZI/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Bella from behind. (JANIE EISENBERG)
The crumbling Pier 52 was a popular spot for gay sunbathers during the summer of 1977.
(LEONARD FINK. COURTESY OF THE LESBIAN. GAY. BI & TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY CENTER NATIONAL HISTORY ARCHIVE)
Bess Myerson chatting with Ed Koch in 1975. Two years later, the former Miss America would become a key figure in the congressman’s mayoral campaign. (JACK MANNING/THE NEW
YORK TIMES)
A glimpse inside a New York City subway car, circa 1977. (JAMES HAMILTON)
Billy Martin being restrained from Reggie Jackson in the dugout at Fenway Park. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Martin and Reggie walking into Tiger Stadium two days after their near-brawl at Fenway. as rumors swirl that the Yankees’manager will be fired. (THE DETROIT NEWS)
Looting on Broadway in Bushwick during the 1977 blackout. (TYRONE DUKES/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
A cop swats a looter in Bushwick.
(BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 19
