And than yesterday it happened, slowly lights began to spread across lower Manhattan. It started in the East Village where the sub-station had exploded during the storm than spread to Chelsea, SoHo, and finally the Village. You would have thought it was New Years Eve the way people were honking their car horns and yelling in the streets. The gallery is in the East Village and was in the first wave so that's where we spent the evening until we heard our building had power sometime around 11, than it was off to a now well lit and warm apartment. One would think a party was called for but after a small celebration at the gallery all I really wanted to do was crash in a warm bed.
It's nice to have our power back but as I write this there are still a million people without power in New York City alone. Some loose ends ...
I still haven't had much first hand news from Stone Harbor but I saw a headline that said Wildwood and Ocean City were the two hardest hit areas in Cape May County, New Jersey. One is to the south of Stone Harbor while the other is to the north. The storm gods must have smiled on Stone Harbor a bit.
Yesterday afternoon we could hear explosions in the city, under the circumstances not exactly what one wanted to hear. Turns out the NYPD was exploding what they called "damaged munitions" out in the harbor. A heads up would have been very nice, very nice indeed.
Some laughed when Goldman Sachs totally sandbagged their building before Sandy hit, the joke being that maybe they wouldn't take away the bags after the storm passed. Nobody laughed afterwards because their building was the only one in the Financial District not flooded and due to their massive generator it was also the only area that never went dark. The dark area immediately bordering Sachs' building became known as the dead zone.
I never thought much about who lived in our neighborhood a century or more ago until Halloween this year. Street after street of darkened apartment buildings and store fronts looking like one huge eerie haunted village. It wasn't hard to picture ghosts peaking out of the windows and zombies running across the wet streets. You don't believe in zombies? Just wait, if Willard wins Tuesday's election the zombie apocalypse will be upon us for sure.
One important lesson I learned during the blackout was that I can survive for a time on bottled water, those little Via Coffee packs by Starbucks, peanut butter, and Ritz crackers. Good to know.
It's nice to have our power back but as I write this there are still a million people without power in New York City alone. Some loose ends ...
I still haven't had much first hand news from Stone Harbor but I saw a headline that said Wildwood and Ocean City were the two hardest hit areas in Cape May County, New Jersey. One is to the south of Stone Harbor while the other is to the north. The storm gods must have smiled on Stone Harbor a bit.
Yesterday afternoon we could hear explosions in the city, under the circumstances not exactly what one wanted to hear. Turns out the NYPD was exploding what they called "damaged munitions" out in the harbor. A heads up would have been very nice, very nice indeed.
Some laughed when Goldman Sachs totally sandbagged their building before Sandy hit, the joke being that maybe they wouldn't take away the bags after the storm passed. Nobody laughed afterwards because their building was the only one in the Financial District not flooded and due to their massive generator it was also the only area that never went dark. The dark area immediately bordering Sachs' building became known as the dead zone.
I never thought much about who lived in our neighborhood a century or more ago until Halloween this year. Street after street of darkened apartment buildings and store fronts looking like one huge eerie haunted village. It wasn't hard to picture ghosts peaking out of the windows and zombies running across the wet streets. You don't believe in zombies? Just wait, if Willard wins Tuesday's election the zombie apocalypse will be upon us for sure.
One important lesson I learned during the blackout was that I can survive for a time on bottled water, those little Via Coffee packs by Starbucks, peanut butter, and Ritz crackers. Good to know.
