The Great Blackout produced euphoria and solidarity rather than panic

Evidence

Yet, “far from creating a mood of dread, the power failure created a mood of euphoria,” the artist Robert Smithson would note. There was an inexplicable, “almost cosmic joy.” Others living downtown recall an unexpected solidarity, a festive energy, and a collective excitement. People asked each other what was happening and what it meant. Richard Tyler materialized at Claes and Patty Oldenburgs’s new Fourteenth Street loft to explain that he had caused the power failure. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 983

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s shelf claim about collective experience: the blackout as a rare citywide moment of festive anomie prefiguring later claims about urban togetherness. — connects to: Paris liberation came as an uncertain, dangerous, anticlimactic moment — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 520; WTC evacuations were calm and cooperative rather than panicked — John Drury, The role of social identity processes…, 33; Even in bad evacuations panic stays confined to a small fraction — John Drury, The role of social identity processes…, 34
• SHARE: The Richard Tyler detail — a man materializing to claim he caused the blackout — is a delightfully specific period quirk worth sending to anyone interested in NYC history.