IN 1969, Norman Mailer, who was pursuing a lark candidacy for the New York City mayoralty at the time, wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine headlined CAN NEW YORK SURVIVE? In July 1977, the question no longer sounded rhetorical.
A few days after the blackout, Union Carbide, the manufacturer of Eveready batteries, took out a full-page ad in the Daily News headlined IT WASN’T A TOTAL POWER FAILURE. The ad pointed out that flashlights had helped lead people safely down dark stairwells and that portable radios had provided vital information to guide citizens through the crisis. “Whatever else may have happened Wednesday night, we can never forget that tens of thousands of New Yorkers rose to the occasion,” it continued. “Eveready is proud of whatever part our products may have played in this service. We’re even prouder of the New Yorkers who used them to help others.”
What the ad failed to mention was that Union Carbide was in the process of moving its corporate headquarters out of New York City—not, as a company spokesman later pointed out, merely because of the crime and high cost of living but because of its “changing ethnic mix, which makes some people uncomfortable, and the graffiti on the subways, the dirt on the streets, and a lot of other things.”
Between 1973 and 1976 the city had lost 340,000 jobs. How many more were sure to follow now? An executive recruiter from Chicago told a reporter that he had been handling an alarming number of resumes from people who were willing to go any place but New York, and that was before the blackout.
Ten days after the lights went out, stolen property recovered in raids or returned by citizens was still arriving at the property clerk’s storehouse in Queens at the rate of five truckloads a day. The estimates from the blackout—the damage, the stolen merchandise, the lost business, the spoiled perishables—fluctuated daily, spiking as high as $1 billion before settling at $150 million. (A year later a definitive congressional study put the losses at a little more than twice that.) The debate was academic. Whatever the final sum, it was one that the barely solvent city would not be able to manage. Any hopes that Con Ed might feel obligated to help out were quickly dashed when Luce kicked the blame upstairs, calling the cause of the blackout “an act of God.”
It seemed safe to assume that many of the looted stores would never reopen. Most of them were in dangerous neighborhoods where insurance was either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. A number of those that were insured had civil disobedience clauses in their policies, which precluded claims for losses incurred during riots. Moreover, most of the looted merchants had moved out of the neighborhoods years earlier and had no real stake in their survival. Given what they had just lived through, there wasn’t much reason to believe that they’d be interested in rebuilding their businesses there.
The rest of the country was hardly sympathetic. In the late sixties the rioting in Detroit and Newark had served to draw attention to the plight of America’s ghettos. The 1977 blackout looting in New York only seemed to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about the city. To go with the fictional portrayals of the dangerous, dystopian metropolis in recent movies such as Taxi Driver, there was now documentary footage.
The Washington Post set the tone, calling the looting “an indictment of the state of the city, its government, and its people.” A spokesman for Miami’s Chamber of Commerce pointed out that America had expected the worst, and New York had not let it down. Even Christianity Today weighed in, suggesting that God had sent his judgment on a city that had turned away from him. “The lack of electricity lit up the reality of people’s minds and hearts,” the magazine wrote. “That’s what people are like when separated from light and the light.” Writing in The New Yorker, Andy Logan summed up the popular sentiment thus: “Instead of comfort, what New York received in the first days after the disaster was often the punitive judgment that it had just got what it deserved, considering the kind of place it was.”
President Carter also rebuffed New York, denying the city’s request to be declared a major disaster area, a designation that would have given it access to badly needed federal funds. Since his election Carter had come to the aid of no fewer than fourteen regions, including some shrimping towns off the coast of his beloved Georgia that had endured a cold winter. But the blackout, the president insisted, was not a natural disaster and thus didn’t qualify for the Federal Disaster Relief Program. The man who had vowed never to tell New York to drop dead was doing just that.
It wasn’t the first time either. As a candidate Carter had criticized President Ford for having “no urban policy.” To date, Carter’s own urban policy had been one of studied indifference. Most noteworthy had been his failure to make good on, or even acknowledge, his campaign pledge to assume the city’s welfare costs, which were currently
exceeding its education budget. (Even Mayor Beame had written off the president. “Jimmy Carter still loves me,” the mayor joked at the annual follies put on by the City Hall press corps. “The last time I met with him, he told me he had a whole list of items to help the city. But he left the list in his other sweater.”)
Surely, in the wake of the blackout a presidential visit to one of New York City’s devastated slums was in order. After all, during his presidential campaign, Carter had worked New York’s black churches until his hymn-humming throat was sore. “We do not anticipate there being such a trip,” responded the president’s deputy press secretary at a late July White House press briefing. (First Brother Billy, meanwhile, was making plans to come to ‘21’ to do a TV spot for Peanut Lolita, a new liqueur made from peanuts.)
Not even a pointed attack from Vernon Jordan, the executive director of the National Urban League, could stir Carter to action. “The sad fact,” Jordan told some seven thousand league members at a conference on July 24, “is that the Administration is not living up to the first commandment of politics: Help those who help you.” Instead of redoubling his efforts to help the urban needy, Carter summoned Jordan to the Oval Office to dress him down, assuring him that he had a “genuine interest in poor people … and that statements that argue to the contrary are damaging to the hopes and aspirations of those poor people.”
When it came to New York anyway, the problem for Carter wasn’t so much the black poor as it was the white middle class, one Italian middle-class enclave in particular: Howard Beach, Queens, an otherwise tranquil bayfront community that had managed to plunge the American president into an international crisis within months of his inauguration. At issue was a 1,350-mile-an-hour plane called the Concorde, whose manufacturers, Britain and France, wanted very much to land it at John F. Kennedy Airport, which happened to abut Howard Beach. It was bad enough, the people of Howard Beach complained, that they had to endure the constant roar of ordinary
airplanes skimming their rooftops, but to add to the mix the boom of a supersonic jet breaking the sound barrier—and one that hadn’t even been built in this country!—was too much to ask.
The angry protests against what one local politician called “the Edsel of the aircraft industry” paid off. The Port Authority of New York, which had jurisdiction over JFK, banned the jet indefinitely. The French, who considered a berth at the airport critical to the plane’s commercial success and thus to the economic viability of the French town where it was being assembled, didn’t take the news well. “The airport is on the sea, and the sea is crowded by fishes, not by people,” sputtered a disbelieving President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
The president defended the Concorde—CARTER TO QUEENS: DROP DEAF, the headlines might have read—and tried to explain to his respective foreign leaders that the decision was out of his hands. To no avail. France threatened to sabotage future projects with the United States, and warned that it might well withdraw from NATO because of this “’Oward Beach.”
And President Carter offered a beleaguered, postblackout New York a paltry $11.3 million in grants and loans—“a sop … a cover-up for federal inaction,” harrumphed Bronx congressman and long shot mayoral candidate Herman Badillo.