Unlike other blackouts that affected the region, namely the Northeast Blackout of 1965 and the Northeast Blackout of 2003, the 1977 blackout was localized to New York City and the immediate surroundings. It resulted in city-wide looting and other disorder, including arson.
The blackout came at a low point in the city's history, with New York facing a severe financial crisis and fretting over the Son of Sam murders. The nation as a whole was suffering from a protracted economic downturn and commentators have contrasted the event with the good-natured Where were you when the lights went out? atmosphere of 1965. Some pointed to the financial crisis as a root cause of the disorder, others noted the hot July weather. Still others noted that the 1977 blackout came after businesses had closed and their owners went home, while in 1965 the blackout occurred during the day and owners stayed to protect their property.
Looting and vandalism were widespread especially in the African American and Puerto Rican communities, hitting thirty-one neighborhoods, including every poor neighborhood in the city. Among the hardest hit were Crown Heights where seventy-five stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick where arson was rampant with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze.
Looting and vandalism were widespread especially in the African American and Puerto Rican communities, hitting thirty-one neighborhoods, including every poor neighborhood in the city. Among the hardest hit were Crown Heights where seventy-five stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick where arson was rampant with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze.
- In 1977, The Trammps released the song "The Night the Lights Went Out" to commemorate the electrical blackout.
- In a what-if alternate history issue of Conan the Barbarian by Marvel Comics, the blackout is connected to a brief time travel visit of Conan to our times. Peter Parker also makes a cameo.
- According to Men in Black (1997), the blackout was caused by a super bouncing energy ball, and the blackout was a practical joke by "The Great Attractor".
- Raymond Stantz knocks out New York City's power while investigating a river of slime in Ghostbusters II (1989).
- Coupled with Son of Sam hysteria, the effects of the blackout on New York City are a key theme of the 1999 Spike Lee film Summer of Sam.
- Rapper Pharoahe Monch's 2006 music video "Push" is set in the night of the blackout.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel Blackout by Keith R.A. DeCandido takes place during the '77 blackout. - In an episode of Phenomenon: The Lost Archives (documenting the works of Nikola Tesla), it was suggested that a Soviet radio tower, broadcasting "noise" which had been labeled the "Russian Woodpecker" by the CIA, coincidentally ceased after a year of continual transmission prior to the blackout.
- The riot features in the computer game The Warriors as a level. The gang must loot shops, graffiti and then escape before the riot police arrest them, but instead the year being 1977 it is set in 1979.
- Jonathan Mahler's 2005 book Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning featured accounts of the riots and looting in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Likewise, news coverage and videos of riots were featured on an episode of The Bronx is Burning TV series.
- The Rosewood Fall, a Californian powerpop band wrote a song about the blackout titled "New York City Blackout".
- T.E.D. Klein's award-winning horror novella, Children of the Kingdom (1985), was set in part during the blackout.
- Part of Jackie Collins's 1981 novel Chances was set during the blackout and it's aftermath.
The episode Heatwave of the series Swingtown used a similar blackout, based on the New York incident, in its fictional Chicago of 1976 as a plot device.
Looting of electronics stores during the blackout allowed a number of kids to obtain DJ equipment. As a result, the Hip Hop genre, barely known outside of The Bronx, grew at an astounding rate from 1977 onwards. Here, South Bronx DJ Grand Wizzard Theodore (right) who invented the art of record scratching, poses with a fan wearing a 1977 blackout t-shirt.
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