The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has temporarily created two cities in Manhattan: one where restaurants serve hot food and warm water runs from the tap, and another where the phones are dead and a shower is like a dream.
The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has temporarily created two cities in Manhattan: one where restaurants serve hot food and warm water runs from the tap, and another where the phones are dead and a shower is like a dream.
Above 40th Street, the Powerless Go to Recharge
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/nyregion/above-40th-street-the-powerless-go-to-recharge.html
The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has temporarily created two cities in Manhattan: one where restaurants serve hot food and warm water runs from the tap, and another where the phones are dead and a shower is like a dream.
At the boundary, around 40th Street on the East Side, an unusual makeshift community has sprung up, one where the basic building blocks of a New York neighborhood — a pizza place, an unremarkable deli, a bank — have become an oasis.
Wednesday evening and into the night, the people from downtown emerged from the cold, enveloping darkness by the hundreds, some with flashlights, some with towels just in case they found a place to shower, some with gallon containers to fill with water to flush the toilet. They stepped into the bright Midtown at East 39th Street at the place where the blackout ends.
Joe Album, 50, had walked with his wife and teenage daughter from 28th Street. They sat at a dingy table in the back of the 765 Food Market on 41st Street and Second Avenue, a few feet from the hot buffet with its clumpy ziti and brownish corn. He was nursing a coffee with a fruit fly at the rim, charging the family’s phones on a power strip and postponing the walk back home as long as he could.
“It’s just so dark and gloomy at home that it’s better to be out,” said Mr. Album, wrapped in a warm coat and a hat. “Plus the apartment is starting to get cold. And when you just sit there, it gets colder.”
The buses, free for now, are crowded with Lower East Side residents headed north to find power for their phones, a McDonald’s, a supermarket. They trundle off at 42nd Street and discover power outlets in unusual places.
On Thursday, a family from Avenue D clustered around a tree on 42nd Street near Second Avenue that has a power outlet at its base. Dozens of people sat on the floor of a side hall of Grand Central Terminal, around a cache of outlets concealed under brass plates. All the coffee places were packed, and several people even sat in alcoves by the entrance at the Gap on 42nd Street, plugging in there.
The rhythm of their lives, they said, had been completely transformed; their new necessities were their main focus. “I spent the entire day yesterday looking for food and charging my phone,” said Marcello Halitzer, 22, who had been given the rest of the week off from his job at Credit Suisse Bank.
One popular place, unexpectedly, is a Chase Bank branch on Third Avenue, which has been opening its doors to anyone, allowing them to bring their dogs inside, charge their phones, use the bathroom and Internet, and get free water and coffee. It has also become something of a tourist attraction.
As downtowners straggle in, some with piercings and leather jackets and mutts on rope leashes, clustering around power strips by the A.T.M.’s at all hours, the Midtown tourists take pictures through the large picture windows, capturing what may be the closest they will come to the City of Darkness.
“They say, ‘Look at these poor people,’ ” said Agata Shultz, 19, who walked up from the East Village and sat on a heated window ledge reading philosophy in Polish and checking her e-mail.
“It’s like a zoo.”
Eric Liebowitz, a photographer who lives on 19th Street, sat on the floor of the bank in a ski hat waiting for his phone to charge. “We are the dark people,” he said.
“The people uptown have no clue what’s going on down here,” he said — and he was enjoying himself, in a way. “Come downtown!” he had just written in a text to a friend. “You will never have an opportunity to see New York like this again — for another year!”
Some people said they had been turned away from hotel lobbies, other banks and cafes near 40th Street when they asked to charge their phones. It was as if, said Gabriella Sonam, a massage therapist who had biked up from the East Village, no one empowered in these places with electricity even knew a national emergency was going on just across the street.
“I’m not traumatized by the storm; I’m traumatized by the indifference,” Ms. Sonam said, near tears.
Joan Koveleski, a bartender with a Siberian husky and streaked magenta hair, had walked with her husband from Houston Street.
After so long in the dark, she said, crossing into the other New York felt like culture shock.
“We had to remember the traffic lights worked up here,” she said. They had been walking in the street. But they, too, after getting some cash from an A.T.M. and charging her computer and phone, would be headed back to where flashing police lights and the headlights of cars are the brightest illumination.
“Maybe we’ll watch a movie on our computer tonight,” she said.
“There’s nothing else to do except sit in the dark.”