Blackout Riots 1977: Revisiting ‘Gone With the Wind’

Broadway is just what its name implies: a wide, two-way boulevard, running from the piers on the East River in Williamsburg in a southeasterly direction for 4.32 miles, ending at its boundary with East New York. It serves to neatly divide Bushwick to the northeast of it from Bedford-Stuyvesant to the southwest. The BMT subway line (the J, M and Z trains) runs overhead its entire length till it makes a sharp right turn into East New York and on into the Borough of Queens. The night of July 13, 1977 and into the early morning hours of July 14, there was a moon but the light it shed on Broadway came through the overhead tracks in weak patches. As we screeched left off Dekalb onto Broadway, we became engulfed in a jungle of black bodies racing helter-skelter, none empty-handed. A wall of metallic noise hit us from storefront gates being torn off by car bumpers with chains, a waterfall of breaking glass; above it all, the exultant screaming of the mob. We abandoned our RMP, locked doors, headlights full-on facing up Broadway that undulated with bodies far as we could see: hundreds, thousands, we couldn’t tell. Then we waded into the crowd, swinging our nightsticks at the moving targets.

Photo: Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times

Police Headquarters, having in the first hours divined the extent of the problem that was enveloping the five boroughs as well as the piddling number of policemen then ready to deal with it, had decreed there be no arrests. An arrest ordinarily required the arresting officer to remove his prisoner to the Precinct to complete the booking paperwork and lodge his prisoner, routinely taking 14 hours. No cop could be spared this night.

During the few hours of darkness left till dawn, our numbers grew as cops in plainclothes spilled from a commandeered City bus, wielding baseball bats. Up and down Broadway, looters beyond counting, smashed into and emptied stores—jewelry, furniture, drugstores, supermarkets the prime targets. They ran loaded down like pack animals—men, women, children. We’d chase and knock the men down; enter the broken stores guns drawn to drive them out. One stunned owner of a used furniture store on Broadway, slumped on a stoop adjacent to his emptied store, asked in anguish: “Where were you? They came across Broadway like a herd of buffalo!” Couldn’t think of an answer, went back to banging heads with renewed fury.

We heard over our radios that Al & Bob’s Sporting Goods store, down Broadway in Lower Williamsburg, was under siege. They must not get their hands on rifles and ammunition; RMPs rushed to that scene. Meanwhile, two cars with a heavy chain stretched between them accelerated up Broadway into the throng; in vain, as the looters ducked under the chain like Limbo dancers or fled to the sidewalks. A pickup truck with four cops on the flatbed appeared, lights on high beams, a cop with a Louisville Slugger leaning out from the running boards on each side cleared obstructions from their path ferociously. The men in the back of the truck tossed boxes of .38-caliber cartridges to us, in anticipation. The radio reported gunfire coming from the rooftops, yet I couldn’t swear to it, the sound of gunfire being indistinguishable in the tsunami of shattering glass, ripping metal, frantic burglar alarms, and the demented bellowing of people as they began to set fire to the emptied stores.

Finally, word came down: Arrest the bastards! Soon the wood structures on both sides of Broadway for blocks lit up the street in an eerie flickering light, then roared skyward in a conflagration, licking at the tracks of the train station overhead. The fires burned out of control till fire trucks took possession of the streets while the mob surged around them. At one dicey moment, cops manned the water canons on a truck, turning them on a threatening crowd, flushing them away. As the night wore on, faces covered in soot from the fires, our bodies leaking sweat from the heat, I remember idly thinking how familiar this scene as I looked heavenward at the towering flames, immediately making the connection: The Burning of Atlanta in the movie “Gone With the Wind.” The only souls on the street being cops, firemen, and looters.

As the new day dawned, there were many more of us engaged in the battle for Broadway. We numbered 142 men at its height, from the two adjacent Precincts, the 83rd and the 81st, according to the official Post-Mortems (weeks later). Looting fever had begun to spend itself and police tactics had devolved to a Game of Hide-and-Seek. We’d knock down and cuff the runners within reach but more often follow the looters into the broken-open stores. In a drug store, we found forty hiding in the basement; to arrest and transport all was beyond impracticable; we gave women and children a free pass. The men we stuffed into the back seats and trunks of the RMPs for a bumpy ride to the Precincts, where they were disgorged like clowns emerging from the Clown Car at the Circus. The Precincts had been ordered to house their prisoners since Brooklyn Central Booking cells were stuffed full already. In the end, my Precinct, the 83rd, had 145 guests for two days. Stuffed standing-room-only into the cells meant to accommodate 14 prisoners, the overflow chained to each other then to radiators, or dumped in a gated open yard that had once housed police horses.

We all made multiple arrests—one cop who’d arrived early, right after he’d observed the City go dark from the rooftop of his apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, arrested thirty; a late arrival, I arrested ten. Arresting officers were not fated to ever see their arrestees again. I no longer remember faces or details except for one slightly-built older fellow emerging from a furniture store carrying a red love seat on his back. I remember it was cherry red and that when I tripped him up with my nightstick as he ran, he let it go and sprang to his feet like a Jack-in-the-Box, declaring in irritation: “I’m not like these people! I have a job!” As the thing wound down by afternoon, the adrenalin replaced by fatigue after ten straight hours, I sat on the curb and watched firemen trying to control the conflagration devouring the structures along two solid blocks on Broadway. I was kept company on the curb by Wilton, the cop from Sunnyside, who’d been at it fifteen hours and was now nodding off, leaning into me.

When it was all over and the tally in: 3,071 looters had been arrested City-wide, 1,088 in Brooklyn alone. Along Broadway, 134 stores had been looted, 45 of them burned to the ground. A mile-and-one-half of commercial Broadway—30 solid blocks—had been destroyed. The fate of the 3,000-plus arrestees— having been held for up to a week in the Chateau d’If conditions of the local jails– was for most a slap on the wrist and release from custody. Few were charged with a felony, and none went to trial. The NYPD claimed that no police fired their weapons during the riot, except for two accidental discharges that hit no one, although two deaths were reported: one prisoner in the Pens at the Manhattan Tombs from heart failure, and one in a looted building from an undetermined cause.

Later, Assistant Chief William Bracey, Commander of Borough Brooklyn North, made the rounds of the Precincts to praise the men under his command. While addressing the cops of the Eight-Three as we stood in uniformed ranks in front of the Precinct Desk, he thanked us for “our bravery and fire discipline.” He was alluding to the Department’s official stance that no cop had fired his weapon in anger during the Battle for Broadway. At that, Officer Wilton, standing at attention in the next rank, said, loud enough to be heard by all: “Where was he? On vacation?’

The 83 Precinct holds a biannual Reunion at the American Legion Hall in Valley Stream, Long Island. A big turnout. I’ve made seven so far. I go to see the cops I worked next to, from 1975 to 1981. Old men, we tell each other stories.

© 2015 Robert Knightly

Sources: ‘The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City’, by Jonathan Mahler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); ‘Blackout Looting’ by Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter (Gardner Press, 1979); ‘BLACKOUT’, by James Goodman (North Point Press, 2003).

A Police Story: Blackout Riots, 1977

The other day I watched an old movie on NetFlix, ‘The Summer of Sam’. It reminded me of my participation in the only full-scale riot I’ve ever been in. The Blackout Riots of 1977 enveloped all of New York City, lasting 25 hours officially or three straight days and nights, depending on who’s counting. No deaths were admitted to by officialdom as having occurred during the looting and arson, yet the event was second only to the 1863 Draft Riots during the Civil War in the scale of the insurrection and destruction to City neighborhoods.

July 13, 1977, started out very, very hot but had cooled off some by early evening when my girlfriend and I went to the movies. ‘Black Sunday,’ a thriller with Robert Shaw as a Mossad agent tracking Palestinian terrorists in Miami, was playing at the American, a down-at-the-heels movie house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a couple blocks from my apartment. It was the last chance to see the movie that had opened in the City in March; you didn’t go to the American otherwise, where the slightly tilted floor was sticky underfoot. Afterward, a few beers, then home since I’d worked an 8-by-4 Day Tour earlier and needed sleep.

At 9:43 p.m. on July 13, 1977, Con Ed’s power suppliers in New England and Westchester County got knocked out by lightning, causing, in classic domino effect, all the lights in NYC to go out and stay out. The city was in the midst of a heat wave when all the air conditioners failed, the subways ground to a halt, street traffic lights blinked out and the five boroughs were plunged into darkness. At that moment, I was in my apartment enjoying a cold beer. In the next hour, I heard over a hand-sized portable radio that looting had begun and was spreading in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Police Commissioner Michael Codd ordered all off-duty policemen to report for duty at their local precincts (big mistake), whereupon I went to bed.

My local Precinct was the 94th, dubbed by cops a “country club” for its law-abiding blue-collar Polish and Irish residents, in Greenpoint, at the northernmost tip of Brooklyn. It looked across the East River to the East 23rd Street Piers in Manhattan and over a puddle-jump bridge spanning the poisonous Newtown Creek to Long Island City (LIC), Queens. I wasn’t about to report to the 94th where I wasn’t needed; I’d head for the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where I was assigned and always needed. But first, I’d sleep awhile, being of little use to the NYPD in my present condition, exhausted and half-in-the-bag. I could expect my tour of duty to be of long, indefinite duration once it began.

At 3:00 a.m., I arose, dressed, checked the loads in my service weapon and off-duty 38-cal. revolver and started for the Bushwick Precinct, a mere four miles away. A quickie trip normally: cross under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, then straight up Morgan Avenue to pick up Wilson, then a short stretch to the turn-of-the-Century Victorian-style Station House looming over the neighborhood like a Norman Keep, at the intersection of Wilson and DeKalb Avenues. The only illumination came from my car’s headlights as I negotiated the eerily dark and silent streets; no traffic except for some souls sitting in cars parked at the curb with their headlights on.

The Precinct House was ablaze with light like Gatsby’s mansion on Party Nights. It drew me like a Beacon does a lost ship. Inside, Lieutenant Jones presided at the desk having been left over from four-by-twelve Tour as were the sixteen other policemen on duty when the lights went out. No one would be off-duty for the foreseeable future. Cops had responded to the SOS from Commissioner Codd en masse, most, unfortunately, ending up in the outer boundaries of the boroughs, closest to where they lived on Long Island and Upstate counties: all without uniforms or riot gear in neighborhoods where they were not needed. Not so in the Eight-Three; it appeared to my eyes that most, if not all, of the 130 cops assigned to the Precinct were present for duty “with hats and bats” (riot helmets and nightsticks). Everyone was in motion, as if the zoo cages had been flung open. No civilians were present in cuffs; the standing Order that had come down at the inception of the rioting was still in effect: “No arrests. Restore order.” (Please!!)

After a pithy briefing (“The shit has hit the fan, men”), I piled into an RMP with three other cops and we raced up Dekalb the three long blocks to Broadway, epicenter of the revolution.

Next Monday, Part 2: The Scene

© 2015 Robert Knightly

Reunion II: Old Men Packing Heat

That night – three or four biannual-reunions ago – Louie, our ex-partner, showed his face after being let out of the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York, having served nine years for Drug Conspiracy. I was talking to my other partner, John ‘Super Cop’, when I spotted Louie. I was delighted; I hadn’t seen him for awhile for obvious reasons. “Hey, there’s Louie!” I said. “I won’t talk to the fuck,” John responded, in that old familiar tone – cold and dead as a tombstone – the one he’d used on the ‘perps’ in the street in the good old days.

I look across the cavernous hall, past the line of aluminum chafing pans full of the usual steaming Ziti Parmigian, Chicken Fransesse, fish-in-a-white-sauce, limp iceberg lettuce salad with flagons of creamy Italian, next to mounds of fresh Italian loaves – lined end to end on the long Bingo folding tables like silver birds in single file about to take flight. I see Louie is surrounded by old cops pumping his hand, touching, laying hands on him in that way men, genuinely moved by emotion, will do, while ever alert to the dangers of losing control.

The glad-handing cops know of the drugs and Louie’s bit in federal jail, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is our shared past on the streets where it counted. Louie had your back; testified to the truth of any cover-your-ass story events required you to tell in Court or to the Bosses; and never, ever ratted you out to the IAB Secret Police (except in John Super Cop’s case, of course, but we’re a forgiving lot). Race never mattered. It was You, the Cops, black or white, against Them, the Criminals, always black or Hispanic, on the streets and in the houses of Bushwick, where some of us died by ambush.

On July 13, 1977, the lights went out, plunging all of New York City into darkness. The worst of the subsequent riots, looting, arson occurred that night and the following day. Bushwick and adjacent Bedford-Stuyvesant bore its brunt. Many of the stores, on both sides of Broadway, the main commercial artery that divided the 83rd and 81st Precincts, were looted, then set afire, over a two-mile-long swath. I was there as was John and Louie and the rest of us. For the first 12 hours, we were ordered by Police Headquarters to make no arrests for fear the station houses would be overwhelmed by the numbers. Every cop in the City had been ordered to report to his Command. Many neglected to put on the uniform; instead, commandeering buses to ride to the scene, armed with nightsticks and baseball bats. We had orders to stop the looters, the arsonists. And we did. We struck them down on the spot, laid them out at the scene of their crimes.

All that night, the flickering flames put me in mind of that scene in ‘Gone With the Wind’, the Burning of Atlanta. Only cops, firemen and looters were abroad on the streets. By dawn, we were allowed to make arrests. The riot had lasted a night and a day. By its end, the 133 prisoners who wouldn’t fit in the 83 Precinct’s cellblock were penned in a gated courtyard outside the station house. Later, the Borough Chief in charge of Brooklyn North boasted that no cop had fired his weapon during the riot. Willie ‘S’ of the Eight-Three demurred, “Where the fuck was he, Hawaii?” Perhaps. the Chief was misled by the presence on Brooklyn Streets for days after of men with bandaged heads suggestive of an invasion of turbaned Sikhs. The final tally for the Blackout Riots throughout the City: 1,037 fires, 1616 looted stores, 3,776 arrests, the worst riot in the City’s history.

In 2003, the journalist, Jonathan Mahler, came to our Reunion to research his non-fiction book, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), A Profile of the Year 1977. He included our stories of that Night and a Day. I forget if Louie was there to tell his, or John. I like to think that next Reunion – if Louie shows up again and John, who never misses – they will forget the bad old past, sit down to break Italian bread together and remember the Good Times.

Robert Knightly

Part one of this story