The Last Switch

In popular imagination, the 20th century metropolis is an indestructible giant --all those skyscrapers and subways, all that steel, stone and glass, all that raw, corpuscular power. But the modern city, New York included, is really a huge, rubbery shell. In the dead of night it collapses just like a deflated balloon, and each morning it is pumped back to life again, not with air but electricity. As little Reddy Kilowatt--the power companies' coy public-relations name for juice --swarms all over town, subways scuttle, elevators shoot, lamps light, machines sew, write, add, cool, talk, sing and growl.

So it was one day last week, the hottest (96DEG) of the year, at the beginning of the evening rush hour. Everything was working, loaded to capacity. Every circuit in town was on, save one (or so the layman was bound to imagine it), and then some poor soul got home from work and turned on the last switch. An air conditioner, perhaps, or just a TV set. Pow!

A big, two-square-mile piece of the balloon, running roughly from 43rd Street to 77th Street, collapsed, and for 4 1/2 mad hours, Reddy Kilowatt was blacked out. Seated at a great church organ, the organist laid ten fingers down on a blasting Bachian chord--and lost it. At Vic Tanny's, dozens of reducers stared in blubbery relief as the complicated electrical contraptions halted their pummeling. At the Paramount Theater, where the projectors run on DC current but the sound on AC, Elvis Presley was silenced at last.

In hundreds of stalled elevators, neighbors spoke to one another for the first time since the last big blackout in 1959. In the subways, thousands of straphangers stood glued and helpless, while firedepartment emergency crews raced from building to building to extricate the sick and the pregnant (most hospitals resorted to emergency power). Somewhere on the West Side, a tattoo artist's needle died on the figure of a purpled nymph. On the streets, the customary traffic snarl tied itself into even worse knots as the traffic lights died; on the East River Drive, a man curbed his car, took off his coat and tie, and in the grand Walter Mitty manner directed motorists for two hours.

As the power came on again, New York City's Mayor Robert Wagner demanded an investigation. Beleaguered Consolidated Edison declared that it was not overloading but faulty circuit breakers that caused all the trouble, and practically guaranteed that this kind of thing would definitely not happen again; but skeptics felt that future blackouts could be prevented only if everybody would please not turn on his air conditioner or all the other appliances that help make the city livable. To most New Yorkers, it was simply sobering to think how utterly they can be at the mercy of a couple of large fuses in a power station--and how vulnerable their big balloon really is.

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