NIGHT OF TERROR

It was a crisis of light, and of darkness--the kind of event that brings out the best and the worst in people. Certainly the 1965 blackout could never happen again, or so New Yorkers had thought. But something very much like it struck Wednesday the 13th, only this time it was frighteningly different. Through the long, sweaty night and most of the following day, the nation's largest city was powerless, lacking both the electricity on which it depends so heavily and any means to stop a marauding minority of poor blacks and Hispanics who, in severe contrast to 1965, went on a rampage, the first since the hot summer riots of the 1960s. They set hundreds of fires and looted thousands of stores, illuminating in a perverse way twelve years of change in the character of the city, and perhaps of the country.

For a short while after the lights flickered out, most New Yorkers refused to believe that a crisis was at hand and gamely carried on. Broadway actors performed under the uncertain beams of flashlights held by stagehands; the nude cast of Oh! Calcutta!, unable to grope to their dressing rooms, borrowed clothes from members of the audience and went home in cabs. Waiters at Manhattan restaurants served patrons by candlelight. Buses were delayed only slightly by darkened traffic lights. Garbage trucks whined as usual on their nightly rounds. Mayor Abraham Beame, assuming, like many citizens, that a fuse had blown, ad-libbed a quip during a campaign speech at the Co-op City Traditional Synagogue in The Bronx. "See," he said. "This is what you get for not paying your bills."

Gradually, however, the realization took over that the unthinkable had happened: at 9:34 on one of the summer's most sweltering nights, air conditioners, elevators, subways, lights, water pumps --all the electric sinews of a great modern city--had stopped. They would not work again for as long as 25 hours. The blackout was far smaller than that of 1965--9 million people lost electricity in New York and the northern suburbs, v. 25 million people in eight states and two Canadian provinces twelve years ago. But the effects were nationwide. TV networks stopped broadcasting for several minutes. The flow of teletyped news from the A.P. and U.P.I, was interrupted, then limped along under jury rigs (see THE PRESS). Wall Street's banks, brokerages, and stock and commodities exchanges shut down for a day.

Beame declared a state of emergency in New York. The city sent extra policemen and fire fighters to the ghettos, portable generators to hospitals, and set up banks of operators to handle citizens' calls for help. But His Honor, who at 71 is running hard for a second term, also began searching for someone to blame. Without bothering to wait for the verdict of investigations ordered by himself, Governor Hugh Carey and President Carter, the mayor quickly zeroed in on Consolidated Edison Co., the company that New Yorkers love to hate (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). Declared Beanie: "Con Ed's performance is, at the very best, gross negligence--and, at the worst, far more serious." Responded Con Ed Chairman Charles Luce: "It's a little like saying, 'We'll have a fair trial before we hang the defendant.' "

Though the jury was still out, the trouble apparently began when lightning struck not only twice but several times, knocking out crucial high-voltage lines feeding in from north of the city. This loss of power had a cascading effect that brought down the city's whole electric system.

Most New Yorkers, from silk-stocking districts to scabrous ghettos, responded with neighborliness and even bravery. But what shocked the city, and much of the world, was that tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics poured from their tenements and barrios--in 16 areas--to produce an orgy of looting. In Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, in Manhattan's Harlem, in the South Bronx, the violence and plundering approached the levels of the 1968 riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The cry echoed through the ghettos: "It's Christmastime, it's Christmastime!" But to Abe Beame, and countless other New Yorkers of all races, it was "a night of terror."

Roving bands of determined men, women and even little children wrenched steel shutters and grilles from storefronts with crowbars, shattered plate-glass windows, scooped up everything they could carry, and destroyed what they could not. First they went for clothing, TV sets, jewelry, liquor; when that was cleaned out, they picked up food, furniture and drugs. Said Frank Ross, a black police officer in Bedford-Stuyvesant: "It's like a fever struck them. They were out there with trucks, vans, trailers, everything that could roll."

Looters looked on anything movable as desirable boodle. Police caught one man in Bedford-Stuyvesant with 300 sink stoppers and another with a case of clothespins. Two young boys were spotted carrying away an end table. "Where'd you get that thing?" a cop shouted. "My momma give it to me--you can have it," said one of the kids as they dropped their loot and dashed into a crowd that was happily watching a blazing furniture store.

At Hearn's department store in Brooklyn, youths stripped clothing from window mannequins, broke their limbs and scattered them on the floor. Said Miguel Ten, a Viet Nam veteran who stood guarding Arnet's Children's Wear store: "This reminds me of Pleiku in 1966. There was a war out here. And the mannequins remind me of the dead people I saw in Nam without legs and arms."

At the Ace Pontiac showroom in The Bronx, looters smashed through a steel door and stole 50 new cars, valued at $250,000; they put the ignition wires together and drove off. Young men roamed East 14th Street in Manhattan, snatching women's purses. Adults toted shopping bags stuffed with steaks and roasts from a meat market on 125th Street in Harlem. At an appliance store on 105th Street, two boys about ten years old staggered along with a TV set, while a woman strolled by with three radios. "It's the night of the animals," said Police Sergeant Robert Murphy, who wore a Day-Glo blue riot helmet. "You grab four or five, and a hundred take their place. We come to a scene, and people who aren't looting whistle to warn the others. All we can do is chase people away from a store, and they just run to the next block, to the next store."

The arsonists were as busy as the looters. Firemen fought 1,037 blazes, six times the normal number, and received nearly 1,700 false alarms. They were set either to divert the attention of the cops or just for the fun of it. When the firemen showed up, their sirens screaming, the crowds pelted them with rocks and bottles. Of the fires, 65 were considered serious, including a store fire in Brooklyn at which 22 firemen were hurt. Another blaze began in a looted factory warehouse in Brooklyn, then leaped across the street to destroy four tenements and finally spread to two other houses. In all, 59 firemen were injured fighting the fires.

One of New York's worst-hit areas was a 14-block stretch of jewelry, clothing, appliance, furniture and other retail stores along Broadway in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Reported TIME'S Paul Witteman: "The evidence of looting was numbing. As firemen fought blazes from cherrypickers, the looters went about their business virtually unmolested. Occasionally they would step over to one of the fire trucks and drink water from a running outlet. Some of the more enterprising looters parked rented trucks on the side streets, engines running, and loaded up with couches, refrigerators, TV sets--the durable goods that will sell most easily on the black market. Periodically, when a rumor swept through the pack that the police were coming, the looters would break and run. But the police, outnumbered and fatigued, often did not try to chase them. When I left the area, it was burning, the flames taking what little the looters left behind."

After touring the ravaged South Bronx, TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin reported: "Streams of black water from broken fire hydrants swept the residue of the looting into the middle of the streets. Burned-out delivery trucks, spilling their seats onto the pavement, blocked doorways. Twisted steel grilles--some yanked from storefronts with trucks that were then filled with loot--lay across sidewalks. In the new Fedco supermarket, shelves gleamed bare and white, while several inches of mashed produce, packages of squashed hamburger, rivers of melted ice cream, and broken bottles covered the floors. The stench was overpowering. Up to 300 stores were cleaned out in the neighborhood, and the next morning sheets of plywood covered most of their smashed windows. Said Policeman John Fitzgerald: 'There are only cops and crooks left here now.' "

In the South Bronx, along East Tremont Avenue, one of the few shopping areas left in the gutted slum, looters stole some $55,000 worth of goods from the huge R & M Furniture store. The next day its owner put out word that he would pay $25 for each TV set returned. Police learned from a tipster that a man had stashed swag in his basement. The cops entered without a search warrant and reclaimed about $2,000 worth of furniture. One of the invading cops admitted later with a laugh: "Now I can be arrested for a violation."

A number of looters were robbed in turn by other thieves, who clawed and wrenched away their booty.

When two men in Bushwick wearily set down a heavy box of shoes, a band of youths swooped in like vultures and made off with the prize. A teen-age girl on Manhattan's upper West Side complained to friends that some boys had offered to help carry away clothes and radios, then had stolen them from her. Said she, with the skewed logic of the looters: "That's just not right. They shouldn't have done that."

Many bystanders cheered on the looters, but others were outraged by what they saw. Complained a black man in East Harlem: "The shop owners don't live here, but the people who work for them do. They run these stores out, and they run out the few jobs in this neighborhood. The lights are gonna come back on, but what about the jobs?" A man in his 30s bitterly taunted marauding teenagers: "You dumb niggers. You get busted, you get hurt for a pair of sneakers. You're dumb, niggers. You're dumb. Sneakers. Christ!"

Shouted another man at a gang of teen-agers who had looted a drugstore: "If my mother gets sick in the night and needs her nitroglycerin, where am I gonna go? Maybe you don't care, but where am I supposed to buy my pills?" Next morning, a young woman walked along Third Avenue, desperately looking for any food store that might be open and unlooted. "I'm trying to buy some bread," she said. "I can't find none."

Stores owned by blacks and Hispanics suffered the same fate as those operated by whites. In Brooklyn, the Fort Green cooperative supermarket--set up by low-income blacks after the 1968 riots--was stripped bare. The store had no steel window guards because, said Manager Clifford Thomas, "we thought we were part of the community. We were wrong."

In many neighborhoods, however, residents joined to protect the property.

Reported TIME'S Lou Dolinar: "In Brooklyn's middle-class Clinton Hill, black, white and Hispanic homeowners sat on their stoops, sharing cigarettes, candles and flashlights, and occasionally pulling up crabgrass to pass the weary hours before dawn. Half a dozen teenage Italians, armed with baseball bats and iron pipes, helped merchants guard a five-block section of Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. At an A. & P. supermarket in Brooklyn, a burly, 6-ft. 8-in. Jamaican security guard brandished a pearl-handled machete and, with four clerks and the manager, chased away a gang of 30 youths." Many owners armed themselves with pistols, rifles or shotguns and sat up all night by candlelight in their stores. Surprisingly few shots were fired. Indeed, there were remarkably few fatalities during the disturbances: three people died in fires, and in Brooklyn, a drugstore owner gunned down a man who was brandishing a crowbar at him while leading 30 youths past the store's accordion-like security fence.

Eugene Riback, the owner of Harlem's Simon Furniture Co., took stock of his wrecked four-story store, behind the protective armor of private guards toting pistols and leashing attack dogs. Two brazen thieves ran in, grabbed a washing machine and headed to the street. One of the guards pointed his gun at a looter's head, three feet away. The intruder snarled: "You either kill me or I go out the door with the washer." He kept going, and the security man sheathed his gun.

On Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, Ernie Blye, a black man, stayed at his tailor shop all night long, grasping a gun, his German shepherd at his heels. A gang of men began to menace him. He cried out: "If you shoot me, my dog will get you!" They closed in relentlessly. Blye shouted again: "I got ten cans of potash upstairs! I'm goin' upstairs now! I blind you, you come up the stairs after me! I blind you!" The crowd left him alone.

Many looters seemed scarcely aware that they were stealing. Said one of two black boys standing outside a stripped bicycle shop near Columbia University: "We're just out shopping with our parents. This is better than going to Macy's." Some blacks resented all the fuss over the looting. Said Lorraine, 14, who had helped plunder a drugstore in East Harlem: "It gets dark here every night. Every night stores get broke into, every night people get mugged, every night you scared on the street. But nobody pays no attention until a blackout comes."

A few boasted of their thefts. P.F., a 28-year-old Hispanic in Harlem, sounded like a shipping clerk reading off an invoice list as he told TIME Writer B.J. Phillips: "Well, I got a stereo worth $400, a dining room set that said $600 in the window, and some bedroom furniture, but not a whole suite. I got some tennis shoes, and a few things from the jewelry store, but I got there too late for anything really good. I got it all done in half an hour, that's how quick I was working." He paused to add it all up. "I'd put the total somewhere between $3,200 and $3,500." Any remorse? "I've got three kids and I don't have no job. I had the opportunity to rob and I robbed. I'd do it again. I don't feel bad about it."

Others offered strained justifications. Said a young woman who called herself Afreeka Omfree: "It's really sort of beautiful. Everybody is out on the streets together. There's sort of a party atmosphere." Declared a young man in Bushwick: "Prices have gone too high. Now we're going to have no prices. When we get done, there ain't gonna be no more Broadway." Said a man in his 30s, grasping a wine bottle in one hand and a TV set in another: "You take your chance when you get a chance." Added Gino, 19, a father of two: "We're poor, and this is our way of getting rich."

The Rev. Vincent Gallo, an activist Catholic priest, summed up the attitudes of people roaming his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

"When the lights went out, people just said, 'Here's our chance to get back at the mothers who have been ripping us off.' There also was a herd mentality, and many of the kids were egged on by adults who said, 'Hey, go get me this. Hey, go get me that.' "

Whatever the cause of the looting, New York's massive show of police force, and the cops' restraint, helped keep the nightmare from becoming even worse or continuing after the lights went back on Thursday. Canceling all leaves, the department mustered about 8,000 of its 26,000-person force, twice the number that would normally have been on duty.

Ever since the student uprisings at Columbia University a decade ago, New York cops have been instructed not to beat or shoot at rioters. Said Deputy Commissioner Francis J. McLoughlin last week: "They were under orders to break up unruly crowds or looters by charging with their night sticks but not shooting over their heads." The cops were responsible for few beatings, no indiscriminate shooting and no killings. About 18 policemen suffered serious injuries.

Reported TIME Correspondent Jack White, who covered the 1968 racial uprising in Washington, D.C.: "The cops have learned a lot about riot control in the last decade. In the past, officers hopelessly outnumbered by angry crowds frequently fired on them and increased their anger. But in New York, large numbers of calm, well-disciplined officers avoided adding to the violence. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, the situation gradually came under control as enough police arrived to station four or five cops on every corner of the most troubled area, while other cops prowled in marked and unmarked cars. One worn-out sergeant told me: 'My ass is numb and my shoulders are scrunched from riding with five other men in a Pontiac Tempest." But it worked. As tensions eased, the police avoided making arrests as much as possible to help cool things off."

Sometimes looters were let go with a warning. One experienced pair of 26-year-old cops, with modish long hair and sideburns, spun around Bedford-Stuyvesant in a battered 1970 Dodge painted to look like a gypsy taxi. They spied a young boy carrying a big box. The frightened kid dropped the carton, and glass tinkled. "What's in the box, Johnny?" asked one of the policemen. ''Booze, man, liquor," replied the kid. "Where'd you get it, Johnny?" "I bought it, man, paid money for it." The cop peered into the box and saw the markings of a newly looted liquor store on broken bottles. Then both policemen advised the kid to "take the box and go home. And by the way, maybe you can do us a favor some time."

But arrests were common. Officers collared more than 3,500 people between the time the blackout struck and 7:40 a.m. Friday, when Beame declared the emergency over. The figure was about eight times the number of arrests in the riots of 1964 and 1968.

The city's courts and prisons were swamped. At Beame's urging, prosecutors refused to plea bargain with suspected looters and arsonists or agree to release them without bail. As a result, police station houses and courthouse holding pens were jammed with prisoners--up to ten in small cells designed to hold one person.

At the Manhattan criminal court, some prisoners shouted protests against the heat and overcrowding. To handle the overflow, the city reopened the Tombs, a Manhattan jail that had been closed by federal court order in 1974 as too decrepit. Feeding the prisoners was a serious problem at first because most restaurants had closed for lack of electricity. Many families brought food to relatives behind bars. Others subsisted on coffee and rolls.

As evening fell on Thursday, the ghettos gradually returned to normal. On some streets there was almost a sense of camaraderie between the cops and the black and Hispanic youths. Some of the officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant swung their long riot sticks like golf clubs, sending tin cans and other debris flying out of the gutter. "Hey, man," called out a black youngster with a chuckle, "your grip is all wrong." In the South Bronx, a brightly lit Ferris wheel slowly revolved in the night sky, its two-passenger chairs filled. Sporting shiny new Adidas jogging shoes, a young teenage boy in Harlem said with a trace of wistfulness: "Christmas is over."

For the owners of the 2,000 stores that were.plundered, Thursday was a day of reckoning their losses. It was a day of sweeping up debris, nailing plywood across jagged, broken windows and pondering whether to reopen. Alan Rubin, owner of the Radio Clinic discount center on Manhattan's upper West Side, told a reporter: "I'm responsible for 25 families--the families of the people who work for me. What's going to happen to them if I pull out? As bad as I got hit, there are other guys who got wiped out. What's going to happen if they can't reopen?"

Those willing to reopen were eligible for low-interest loans of up to $500,000 from the Small Business Administration. More than 400 store owners asked for information about the loans, but many others were skeptical. They said that they had been stripped bare and demolished, that all they had worked and saved for over the years was gone, that it was financially and emotionally impossible for them to start again. Declared Stanley Schatel, owner of Nice & Pretty, a badly damaged sportswear store in Brooklyn: "Get a loan? Are you crazy? You think anybody in his rightful mind would want to get back to this neighborhood?" Yet quite a few merchants were thinking of doing just that. "I have to pay off the creditors," said Gary Apfel, owner of Lee's Store, a men's clothing store in Harlem. "I want to close, but I can't afford to close."

More people than just store owners had to make fresh starts on the morning after the night of darkness. Rose Stevens, an elderly widow, wandered weeping down Broadway in Brooklyn, looking for a new place to live after spending the night alone in her $57-a-month apartment above a meat market that had been burned out by vandals. "I wish I died," she cried. "I'm almost 70 years old, and I have no place to go."

Many black and Hispanic leaders across the country were dismayed by the rioting. In a typical comment, Carlos Castro, president of Chicago's Puerto Rican United Front, noted that the plunderers were poor and lived in slum housing, though he said of the violence: "You can't justify it." So far, there were no signs of a white backlash, even though many broadcast and newspaper accounts of the power failure emphasized the disorders. Sample headline from the Los Angeles Times: CITY'S PRIDE IN ITSELF GOES DIM IN THE BLACKOUT. Newspapers abroad also focused on the looting. A headline from Tokyo's Mainichi Shimbun: PANIC GRIPS NEW YORK; from West Germany's Bild Zeitung: NEW YORK'S BLOODIEST NIGHT; from London's Daily Express: THE NAKED CITY.

Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers and visitors responded to the crisis with some of the same good humor and willingness to help each other that they had exhibited twelve years earlier. At Beame's request, stores, banks and most offices closed, reducing traffic on the city's streets. At the intersection of Park Avenue and 79th Street in Manhattan, an athletic young man wearing a cape and holding a pink flare controlled traffic like a matador handling a bull. On the other side of the island, traffic was directed on Riverside Drive by David Epstein, 17 He joked: "My mother told me to go out and play in the traffic, and here I am." Sixteen passers-by turned Coney Island's 150-ft.-high Wonder Wheel by hand, enabling stranded riders to reach the ground.

Most of the city's 17 hospitals switched smoothly to emergency generators. But Bellevue's back-up system failed, and doctors and nurses had to squeeze bags of air with their hands to keep several patients alive until resuscitators could be turned on again. When back-up generators broke down at Brooklyn's Jewish Hospital and Medical Center, about 100 people had their wounds--mostly cuts from knives and broken glass--cleaned and stitched at a makeshift field hospital set up in the parking lot under high-intensity spotlights powered by fire-department equipment.

Hotels were jammed with tourists, conventioneers and suburbanites who could not make it home because the electric-powered commuter trains were out. At the Algonquin, guests were unable to get into their rooms for an hour because the doors lock electronically. Many spent the night partying at the round tables in the dining room that was made famous by Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. At the New York Hilton, switchboard operators phoned each room to tell guests that two can dles were in every bureau--fixtures since the 1965 blackout. The hotel offered free coffee and food through the night to hundreds of people who milled through the lobby; employees clambered up the stairs each hour with food for the guests on the upper floors. "Alors, c 'est extraordinaire!" exclaimed a Swiss tourist, Irene Baillod, after trudging down from her 39th-floor room only to find that she had left behind flash cubes for her camera.

Some 500 diners at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, finished their meals by candlelight and rode to the ground on a service elevator that was served by an emergency generator. But 35 people were stranded for the night on the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. After a free breakfast provided by the building's management, half of them walked down the stairs to the ground, while the others waited until the elevators began operating again Thursday afternoon.

On Broadway, Tom Courtenay continued in Otherwise Engaged by flashlight, with an actor shouting "Erring!" when a phone was supposed to ring and humming the overture to Wagner's Parsifal in place of a recording. About a quarter of the 2,000 people who were watching the stage show Salute to New York City stayed on at Radio City Music Hall after the lights went out, snacking on pretzels and Italian ices bought from street vendors who crowded into the foyer. At Shea Stadium, play stopped in the sixth inning, with the Chicago Cubs leading the New York Mets 2 to 1. For about 45 minutes, the 22,000 fans sang along with Organist Jane Jarvis; to take their minds off the heat, she played White Christmas.

Doormen at some high-rise buildings gave tenants candles and flashlights to help them climb to their apartments, but others groped in the dark. Anyone living on the upper floors was without water because pumps had stopped and rooftop tanks were quickly emptied. Some people preferred to bed down in the lobbies or walk the streets. Others sat in their cars, listening to the news--any news about the blackout.

Few bars remained open, and they were packed with thirsty people even though their ice supplies were rapidly melting. Said one woman who had visited three other bars before she stopped at P.J. Clarke's, a well-known East Side watering place: "We're typical New Yorkers. We're going to get smashed." At Elaine's restaurant on Manhattan's upper East Side, tables were moved outdoors for a block party. The guests included Woody Allen, Al Pacino, Andy Warhol and Designer Calvin Klein. At One Fifth, a Greenwich Village restaurant decorated with fittings from the cruise ship R.M.S. Caronia, a patron quipped: "We've hit an iceberg." Pianist Nat Jones scrounged a candle to light his keyboard and played It Ain't Necessarily So. Unfortunately, it was.

There was some fast free enterprise--and some gouging. At a fancy East Side high-rise apartment building one block from Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence, two boys with flashlights offered to escort people up the stairs at $1 each. Some cabbies cruised with their off-duty lights on, trying to negotiate high-priced deals, charging as much as $50 for the trip from Shea Stadium to Manhattan, which normally costs about $10. Cold cans of beer and soda went for $3 in Forest Hills, Queens. An ice-cream vendor in Greenwich Village did a brisk business. As the temperature in his refrigerated case dropped, so did his prices--until he finally gave away free but slightly soggy cones.

The cost to New York is more difficult to reckon. There was no official estimate of the loss, but some city officials thought the total--including damage to buildings and theft of their contents--might be a staggering $1 billion or more. Because of the blackout, the city lost $4 million in tax revenue and had to pay $5 million in overtime to policemen and firemen. Estimates of business losses--beyond the looting--included up to $15 million in lost brokerage commissions for Wall Street and $20 million for retail stores.

Most of these could be made up later, when banks, brokerages and other businesses reopened. But the far more important price cannot be tallied. What had the city lost in terms of morale and image? Deputy Mayor Osborn Elliott, in charge of keeping old jobs in the city and bringing in new ones, announced the blackout at least had not caused a group of oil suppliers from Houston and New Orleans to drop consideration of moving some of their offices to the city. But how many businessmen thought of moving out? How many will become more difficult to sell on moving in? At best, Elliott's job has been a holding action, and last week's crisis, he said with great understatement, "doesn't help."

Speaking of the emergency procedures that were supposed to have kept the electricity from failing.

Federal Power Commission Chairman Richard Dunham remarked. "Quite obviously something didn't fit." The same might be said of the city's comity of neighborhoods, the uneasy web that both binds and separates rich and poor, white and nonwhite. As in all big-city riots, the chief victims of the long hours of darkness were the people who live in the devastated ghettos and have no other place to go. No amount of booty can compensate the looters for what they have lost.

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