The night the lights went out in Manhattan

Remembering the blackout that hit Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy

It was around approximately 9 p.m. on October 29, 2012, when Hurricane Sandy was at its peak, that lower Manhattan was plunged into darkness.

The ConEd substation on East 13th Street in Alphabet City flooded, causing a huge transformer explosion—visible from as far away as Brooklyn and the Lower East Side—that knocked out part of the island's grid. That disaster was compounded by outages at two other lower Manhattan substations, eventually leading to a days-long blackout that affected hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

There's a now-iconic photo by Iwan Baan, featured on the cover of New York magazine's November 5, 2012 issue, that gives a sense of how widespread the blackout was. Manhattan was an island bifurcated; there was everything above roughly 30th Street, where you could almost believe that things had gotten back to normal. But once you crossed from midtown into downtown—or, as some people jokingly noted, into a new neighborhood called SoPo (as in, South of Power)—New York was a completely different place.

Some parts of lower Manhattan still had power (notably, Goldman Sachs's West Street headquarters), but most of those neighborhoods stayed dark. There were no traffic lights, no neon signs illuminating normally busy streets; even bodegas, which are generally assumed to operate no matter what, closed. Without power, what else could they do?

Curbed photographer Max Touhey was out in Manhattan the day after Sandy tore through the city, and his photos from the night of October 30 capture the eerie, empty vibe that took hold in the days after the storm. Check those out below, and if you've got a memory from the blackout, feel free to share in the comments.

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Financial District

Soho

Chinatown