The 1977 Blackout
On July 13, 1977 at 9:34 pm, the lights went out in New York. This wasn’t the first blackout in New York City—the “where were you when the lights went out?” blackout of 1965 was a fairly recent memory—and it wouldn’t be the last, but it did leave an indelible mark. Caused by a series of lightning strikes to various components of the city’s electrical generation, transmission, and distribution system, the blackout left parts of New York without electricity for up to 24 hours. Per an article by Victor K. McElheny from the July 16, 1977 edition of The New York Times, “one factor in the slowness…
July 11th-July 14th 1977: The Week a Little Girl was Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn and the Lights Went Out Across NYC
This post was written by Chantal Valencia Lawrence, a recent volunteer at BHS and a Brooklyn native. When I think of the 1977 Blackout that took place in New York City from July 13th-14th, I reminisce about a ritual that my mother would perform annually on July 11th. On this day in 1977, my mother, grandmother and the maternity staff of Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and Medical Center welcomed a baby girl named Chantal into the world at 4:05pm. From my birth in 1977 till her death in 1993, my mother would pull out an old photo album that contained an article from The Star newspaper and read to…