99% Invisible - 136- Lights Out

Episode Date: October 14, 2014

On July 13th, 1977, lightning struck an electricity transmission line in New York City, causing the line’s automatic circuit breaker to kick in. The electricity from the affected line was diverted to another line. This was fairly normal and everything … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It's New York City, 1882. At night, the city is mostly dark, but it won't be for long. Thomas Edison has already invented the phonograph, the automatic telegraph, and the first commercially viable light bulb. He really could have stopped right there, but he was still young, only 35 years old. And then he had the brilliant idea of doing something even more ambitious. He wanted to construct, to design, the electrical system that would supply electricity for those bulbs. That's Philip Shoei, he wrote The Grid. It's a history of how society uses and loses electricity. The Edison illuminating company built a power station in Lower Manhattan, right in the shadow

of the newly constructed Brooklyn Bridge. The first grid was small, about one square mile, and it worked so well that soon all across the country, these little self-contained electrical systems started popping up. In the coming 10 and 20, 30 years, the grid got larger and larger. As the grid grew, it made modern life possible.

It powered electric lights, running water, sewage pumps, elevators, and air conditioning. But the bigger the grid got, the more complicated it got, and the more the possibility of failure crept in. Whenever we talk about large, designed, human-made, complicated, electrified things. It sometimes takes four or five things together going wrong, but if the system is complicated enough, then the chances of something bad happening go up. Which brings us to New York City's blackout of 1977.

It wasn't the first blackout or even the biggest, but it might have been the most infamous. That's producer Delaney Hall. And oh yeah, this story, it's not about Thomas Edison. Though it begins with the electrical grid, he started building back in 1882. A grid that got so big, it's been called the most massive engineering project of the 20th century. This story is about what happens when you disconnect people from that grid for one hot night in New York City. It was just time.

What we're gonna do right here is go back. It was time for a new... Way back. Interpretation. Back into time. That's hip-hop pioneer grandmaster cats. And he says on that night, when the lights went out, a movement was born. He says on that night when the lights went out, a movement was born. If I was a kid in the 50s, I'd have been Chuck Berry.

You know what I'm saying? If I was in the 30s or 40s, I'd have been a jazz artist. It's the same energy that every generation, you know, exercises, and it just comes out in different forms. This is Grand Master Caz, and yes, I was there during the night of the 1977 New York City city blackout and survived. Thunderstorm swept over the New York City area on a hot night in July. What happened in 1977, first of all you have what this might even be the technical war for an act of God.

A lightning bolt came down and struck a overhead transmission line. When lightning adds a bunch of extra electricity to a transmission line, the line shuts itself off at the circuit breaker. When one line shuts off, the electricity starts squeezing into smaller and smaller channels, like how cars on the freeway crowd into a single lane when the other lanes are blocked. This is all fairly normal so far, but then... Just 10 or 15 minutes later, another flash of lightning. And this knocked out a couple of lines. So now you've got even more electricity with

fewer lines to distribute it. And it was hot outside, really hot, which meant that lots of New Yorkers were running lots of air conditioners putting an extra burden on the system. And now they started to have trouble. There wasn't enough room for all the electricity to flow. And so Khan Edison, that same power company that Thomas Edison started way back when he was laying the lines for the first electrical grid, started doing that the very last thing they like to do, which is to turn off whole neighborhoods.

One by one. By one. Okay, so the year the blackout, hip hop was starting to spread, but it was still pretty much a Bronx kind of thing. It didn't have a name, you know, people refer to it. Oh, y'all still doing that hippity-hoppity stuff. Hip-hop, hippity-hopp, hip-to-the-hop, hip-hop, the hippity-hipp-hop. Okay, hip-hop, you know what I mean? I do remember what New York was like in that era, and I remember how chaotic it was. That's Joe Schloss. I'm a professor at City University of New York, and I research and practice hip-hop culture. New York City had experienced a major blackout in 1965 in which the city had stayed mostly

calm. During the blackout of 1965, residents treated the situation with good humor and camaraderie. But things felt different in 1977. It was like a powder gig, like something like that was on the verge of happening all the time, all it took was something to push it over the edge. A couple years before, in 1975, New York City was in such a dire financial situation that it had turned the federal government for a bailout. President Gerald Ford's response was a resounding no prompting the New York Daily News to run

a now famous headline. Ford to City, dropped dead. In 1977, things were still bad for New York, and in the Bronx, they were even worse. You had neighborhoods that had lost something like 46% of the population. My name is Lloyd Altan, and I am the Bronx Barrow Historian. And there were blocks, I have the block, I have the block of rubble. And beyond that, what was on the horizon were buildings that were empty and boarded up.

Really, it looked like Berlin right after the bombings in World War II. The municipal government had forgotten about the Bronx. And then the youth in the Bronx had been forgotten about by the older people in the Bronx. We didn't have those music programs, all those will cut out. When we were kids, you know, we had them,

but those intermediate years, it's like, we didn't have none of that anymore. So they were like a forgotten minority of a forgotten minority of a forgotten minority. So, I mean, you can really see how people could feel that they had been left behind. I mean, it's hard to describe, you know what I mean? Cause now that we older, I can look back and say, wow, we got through some pretty rough

times, you know, but rough, if you were born into rough times, then it's just times. That's what it goes for. And once again my friend, the fuck your beat has no end. We about to take it on down to the 8M for you and your friend. Because the sound you hear is kind of tough on your ear, coming at you so loud and clear, so you have no fear. On the evening of July 13th, 1977, the same day as the blackout, Grandmaster Kaz and his partner, Disco Wiz, had been challenged to a DJ battle by another group of DJs. So we decided to take our equipment out into the park. We used to hang out, play basketball, and then every day so that's where the

battle was going to take place. They set up all their stuff, so I had my side. I just remember them having a very, very good professional sound system, and us having our thrown together, you know, in pieces, said. The two groups of DJs started to battle. I was doing this little combo that I used to do, and one song was a song by DC Lurou And I was cut it up with this other breakbeat Then then then then then ah Love love love and I was killing them

Now remember that the hype of everybody, you know, being really excited. And then the record just started slowing down, you know what I mean? Just, you know, you know how it turned to be cut off and then it just, ooooooooh, that kind of situation. So quite naturally, we thought it was us. We thought we had drained too much power and we shorted out, you know, the electricity. So, we're frantic. We're looking around. We're checking buttons. We're checking switches. We're seeing what's up. Cause this is death in the battle. If your system cons out on you. But after a while, everything around us started getting dark.

I mean, windows, the apartment buildings around us were all dark. It kind of came over everybody at the same time, like, oh, blackout! Generators all over the city had been turning themselves off one by one. And then the biggest generator in the city. A machine called Big Alice. It turned itself off and with that just about everything left that was still lit up in New York turned off. All five burrows of New York City went dark. But if you turn all those fluorescent lights off that glow that diffuse light goes away and you can look up, pow, there it is, the Milky Way.

goes away and you can look up, POW, there it is, the Milky Way. If people took a minute to gaze up at the newly visible night sky, they didn't stargaze for long. Because pretty soon, things started to feel tense. The stores started to close. Like the local bodegas on each corner, we would hear the gate slamming down. Shroom. Shroom is like they knew what was happening. They knew what was going on. They like, we closing up now.

New Yorkers reactions were varied. Some through parties, some went walking, and many seemed bemused. Some stayed up in the bars and clubs, and some went out to help. But many took advantage of the sudden chaos. The park was right around the corner from the grand concourse in the Bronx, which is like shopping area all the way up and down. Stores, electronic stores, toy stores, furniture stores, pet stores, I mean everything. Here in the corner of 130 just streets was Broadway.

I'm amazed to find the right people in my eyes are singers sewing machines, stores systematically being alluded by a crowd of about 40 or 50 people. I saw people taking stuff that people had stolen, you know what I mean? They couldn't get in this store, so they waited for people to come out to steal something and then just grab it from them. It was chaos that night. And it was exciting afterwards. But while it was going on, it was scary. In the Bronx, looters smashed a steel door of an auto showroom and drove off with 15 new cars, valued at $250,000.

Every other block has a high five store, a liquor store, a sporting goods store that was broken into. Looting was rampant, and people stole all kinds of stuff, including DJ equipment, turntables. They wanted to become DJs. They wanted to, you know what I mean? And equipment cost. And so that's why you can count the amount of DJs that they work. I even, like I said, I even got a new mixer. I went right to the place where I bought my first set of DJ equipment.

I spent money in here and I went by and I got me a mixer out of there. The blackout lasted 24 hours and some people, including Grandmaster Kaz, think it catalyzed the growing hip-hop movement. After the blackout, all this new wealth that I like to call it, you know what I mean, was founded by people and they just, you know, opportunity sprang from that. And you can see the differences before the blackout and after. So the question is, did they go and seal turntables and things like that so that they could actually become those disshokies?

I think it's true. I cannot rule out the possibility. But I think it's also important to keep in mind that basically hip hop history is an oral history at this point. But I cannot say definitively that that actually did happen. And that it's all mythology in some sense, the true stories as well as the false stories. We have to keep our music alive. We have to keep exercising this need, this inner need, from our soul to experience music. Let's go, like this.

Go down and we're smiling at the bottom at the top of the dam, young baby. Say I was a rival to the show, a child, more a child. As a whisper, go ride the bottom to the bottom Say I was a shy one, but sure, I'm shy and more shy As soon as we're gonna rock the side and do the part of people If everything you listen to I'm gonna get paid And as they say, they eat your soul I know you're okay, the zero's rock the microphone When other race, style, customer, free, yes, Cindy

We gotta be easy, we'll tell you everyone's desire To be young, baby, Cindy 99% Invisible was produced this week by Delaney Hall and Katie Mangle with Sam Greenspan Avery Truffle, and me Roman Mars. This episode was based off of a piece that Delaney did for the In the Dark Radio series based in London. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced by the offices of Arxine in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. All of us are on Twitter, in California. Radio Tapio.