As power outages go, the Broadway Blackout of 2019 was pretty modest. About 73,000 customers lost power in parts of Manhattan's Midtown and Upper West Side neighborhoods for several hours just as evening fell on the city's central entertainment district. Some people were briefly trapped in trains and elevators, but the lights were back on by midnight. In the meantime, cast members of suddenly cancelled Broadway shows took to the sidewalks to sing a few numbers. Patrons at bars continued to drink by the light of their phones. One couple even said their wedding vows by candlelight.
In all, it was a happy contrast to the devastating blackout of 1977, which triggered two days of mayhem (“even the looters were getting mugged,” noted the New York Post). But the temporary inconvenience was not something to take lightly. Blackouts like this are warning signs of underlying rot in our electrical grid. And they may well get worse before they get better. New York governor Andrew Cuomo, stepping in for New York City's habitually AWOL mayor, Bill de Blasio, called the outage “unacceptable.” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas noted that New York wants “to be the center of the universe, but we cannot even keep the lights on for a Saturday evening.” Under the green-energy policies being implemented in New York and elsewhere, such blackouts could become more commonplace in the future.
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