'I like New York'

A couple things I’ve noticed about the recent power failure on the East Coast. First off, CNN reports have stated that after the power went down, there were a grand total of four reported burglaries, and the perpetrators were caught in all four. That report has later been amended to say that while there have been 850 arrests in the past 24 hours, and 350 of them were for burglary and/or looting, that is actually a drop in crime from a normal summer night.

That’s cool.

Then I found this comment in the MeFi thread about the outage, and wanted to share it.

So when it happened I was in Rockaway Beach, Queens — which for those of you who don’t know NYC, is about the furthest away from midtown Manhattan you can be and still be in New York City. On a good day it’s still more than an hour’s subway ride from there to my home in Long Island City, Queens (across the East River from the U.N.). So I knew I’d have an adventure getting home without the subway. But some great things happened along the way:

• At the time I was eating in a restaurant in Rockaway, and since I couldn’t pay for it with my credit card or go to an ATM, I used the last of my cash in my wallet — \$10 — to pay for my meal. When a waitress found out I had to get home with only my Metrocard (which works on buses as well as the subway) but no cash, she gave me \$10 of her own just in case I needed it, and her address so I could repay her “whenever.”

• With my Metrocard I began taking any combination of random buses that would get me away from Rockaway, and ended up riding through various Brooklyn neighborhoods that I’d never seen from above ground. People were just hanging out on the sidewalks, having barbecues and playing cards, while the people driving cars became amazingly polite and turned every intersection with useless streetlights into a four-way stop. Never heard a damn horn, which is pretty amazing.

• I ended up in South Williamsburg, on a street where I knew I could catch one final bus, the B61, back to my own neighborhood. But I stood there for more than an hour, and the few buses that passed were packed sardine-like and wouldn’t stop. Finally a guy in a big car slowed down and offered me and the six people I was standing with a ride to Greenpoint, which was much closer to where we needed to be. So we all piled in his car as he talked about the blackouts of ’77 and ’68. I gave him the \$10 bill the waitress had given me, and some of the other strangers gave me dollar bills.

• From where he dropped us off, it was only about a 20-minute walk back to my place. By this point the sun had set and it was completely dark, but people had put candles on the sidewalks to help pedestrians navigate. One guy passed us carrying a torch.

• As I approached home, I was pretty dehydrated from my three-hour journey; all the 24-hour delis and various places where one could get water were shut down. And I’d called my husband and learned that our building didn’t have running water, as the pump was electric. On my otherwise empty street, though, there was a Vitamin Water truck, with a guy behind the wheel who was starting it up. I asked if he was selling any Vitamin Water — I had \$4 in my pocket — and he said, no, he’d just been giving away promotional bottles, but he was out of the promo packs. When I mentioned that my building had no water, he looked alarmed and said, “Well, we might have a few bottles in back.” He fished out five for me and my neighbors, and refused to take any cash.

• And I made it home. I like New York.

  Every so often, you run across something that makes you think that there might be hope for this world after all.