Y2K? Y2shmay. If you wanted to see New York City brought to its knees, felled by the sudden failure of the machines that make modern existence possible, you needed look no further than the East Village yesterday, six months before the century's close.
At East Village Pharmacy on Avenue A, early-morning shoppers cleaned the shelves of candles and flashlight batteries, as if preparing for nuclear war.
Just outside, traffic was a free-for-all at the lawless intersections of Alphabet City, ungoverned by working traffic lights or working humans.
A dejected expression overtook the face of a woman, nine months pregnant, who ambled to Key Food yesterday morning, only to find it dark and shuttered.
"My chickens are cooking, but I got no way to sell them," a supermarket employee, known in these parts as John Deli, reported cheerfully.
"The registers aren't working," the man said. "We can't collect money. Hey - at least I get paid by the hour."
But nearby Discount Liquors managed to sell a pint of whiskey to a man, who looked as though he really needed it, the old-fashioned way - despite the absence of such amenities as refrigeration, computers, air conditioners or overhead lights.
"We have to record everything manually, on paper," said liquor-store worker John Melendez. "It's back to basics."
Of course, the Lotto machine, which runs on phone lines, was in perfect working order.
And so were the Village's parking meters, which greedily gobbled quarters as if nothing were amiss.
Hundreds - maybe thousands - of East Village residents woke up yesterday with little or no power. That included elderly tenants of Village View apartments, who found themselves in the dark, 21 stories above the ground, without an operating elevator to carry them to earth.
But as the streets looked like something out of "Mad Max," and powerless stores propped open automatic doors with chairs - that is, if the stores were open at all -police were in short supply.
Con Ed workers, no doubt enjoying a break in the heat, idled on the sidewalks without a sweat.
"Nothing we can do until they put out that fire downtown," a Con Ed man told me, talking about a transformer fire on Essex Street blamed for the chaos. Then he briskly walked off to nowhere in particular.
Yesterday, the attention of this city was focused on Washington Heights. But other large swatches of New York suffered virtually unnoticed.
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