TIMES SQUARE NEW YORK CITY BLACKOUT ON ANNIVERSARY OF FAMED 1977 OUTAGE

Times Square Manhattan Blackout

ABC NEWS -- Parts of midtown Manhattan in New York City were hit with a power outage on Saturday evening, causing Times Square billboards to go dark, leaving people trapped in elevators and shutting down a Jennifer Lopez concert at Madison Square Garden.

Just before midnight on Saturday, Consolidated Edison Inc, New York City's power provider, said that power had been restored to all of the 73,000 affected customers, though some lingering issues continued, such as darkened traffic lights. The utility's news conference at one of its Upper West Side locations was briefly interrupted by whoops and cheers as lights came back on.

"This is something that we have plans for -- every precinct has plans for. ... We've been through this and we really know what we need to do," New York Police Commissioner James O'Neill said at a late Saturday press conference.

The outage began just before 7 p.m. and initially impacted about 20,000 customers. An hour later, the impacted area nearly doubled, and the outage eventually spread even further, causing the lights to go out at Madison Square Garden, a Con Ed spokesman said. 

It is also interesting to note that this happened on the anniversary of the 1977 blackout. You can see those photos from NBC News 42 years ago HERE.

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