Rumors coursed wildly; crowds were alternately lining up for cars and gas masks or hitting the highway in a rush, sitting for hours on congested roads. Everyone was up in arms, and the Army and National Guard could just barely control the mobbed streets, anxiety and fear flaring on every corner, spreading slowly across the city, simmering. Hundreds of National Guardsmen were drafted in from all over New York State to prevent the breaking out of riots.
The Police Department had by now issued instructions for the more affluent members of society to drive out of the area. They designated highways as strictly one-way systems, and decreed which roads could be used to get away, no matter who you were. If you lived in Brooklyn or Long Island, the way out was across the Verrazzano Bridge to Staten Island, and then through the Outerbridge toll, wide-open now, crossing onto highways running west and southwest.
Residents of Queens and Manhattan were ordered to use the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and then pick up the westward highways. The great span of the George Washington Bridge was off-limits both ways, for the use of the Police, Army, and Government Officials only. The great convoys of trucks evacuating the city were nonstop, both ways, twenty-four hours a day.
During the weekend, a brand-new worry cropped up. Thousands of people, many of whom hardly spoke English, were too afraid to wait for their transportation slots from the Army, the National Guard, or the New York City Police Department. Some were more afraid of those than of the incoming tidal wave. Many took matters into their own hands, buying and temporarily fixing up an entire armada of ancient car wrecks, not only unfit to be on the road but a danger to anyone in or near them.
This clapped-out procession of backfiring, brakeless rattle-traps was moving like a mobile junkyard out into the mainstream of the traffic, which was now already crowding the roads and highways.
By Sunday evening, the traffic jams had escalated, the likes of which had rarely, if ever, been seen in the free world. People were sitting on the roadside beside vehicles that were filled to overflowing with humanity and possessions. Cars edged slowly towards the west, coming to a complete standstill as soon as an ordinarily harmless, flat battery felled a vehicle in front of it. On the Triboro Bridge and the 59th Street Bridge, both levels of each were throbbing with cars. Cars jammed the Whitestone, clogged the Throg’s Neck, and brought the West Side Highway to a standstill. The Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the Harlem River Drive were simply parking lots.
By Monday morning, the Mayor had signed an edict giving the New York Police Department emergency powers to sequester every broken-down truck in the city and hand it over to the National Guard. The authorities could designate instant scrap-yards; under raised highways and under bridges, they beat down wire fencing to free up space on outdoor basketball courts. They dragged vehicles off the bridges and out of the tunnels and dumped them in the nearest available space.
The Mayor had already declared New York City a potential disaster area, and now he had the army move in and take over the subway and all of its trains, as well as Amtrak and the entire Long Island Rail Road.
The trains were for transportation out of Manhattan and Long Island only. But the going was slow. Vast lines of travelers had been formed along Seventh and Eighth Avenues around 33rd Street, waiting for hours to enter Penn Station.
The trains were efficient and available to move people out of the city on a continuing basis, and the executives of Amtrak and the major New York bus corporations were summoned to City Hall to coordinate and manage the operations.
A massive complex — a refugee camp of sorts — was set up in the hills of New Jersey, west of the horse country around Far Hills. It was a former Army base and the huts were still waterproof. By Monday evening, 100,000 Guards and Troops were on duty, assisting with the evacuation from New York City.
The nearest New York came to full-blooded riots was, curiously, at truck hire corporations, which were attempting to quadruple the usual prices. The companies had no way of knowing if they would ever see their trucks or vans again in the face of the oncoming disaster, but locals saw it as naked price-gouging, a cynical exercise in ripping off frightened citizens. Three hooligans actually set fire to one rental operation on the Lower East Side, torching the office and three vans. The fire department didn’t make it in time to salvage them, and the National Guardsmen who arrived quickly on the spot had little sympathy for the owners.
The Police Chief and the Mayor moved in immediately and made price increases illegal, adding that if van rental corporations no longer wished to conduct business, that was fine too, empowering the National Guard, in the same breath, to sequester all trucks in the city.
They came a few hours too late for a more serious riot on the lower West Side when hundreds of fleeing people became enraged at the asking price of $1,000 a day for a compact-sized van. They stormed the office, overpowered the four assistants, smashed the windows, seized the keys hanging on a cork board at the rear of the counter, and made off with twenty-six vans.
Again, there was nothing much the Police could — or would — do. They were working in squadrons with the Army, systematically clearing out residential blocks, helping people with their possessions, issuing exit instructions from the city. More and more National Guardsmen were being ferried in from Upstate New York to help with the compulsory evacuation.
And their task was mammoth, especially in Midtown and the Upper East Side where so many residential apartment blocks were crowded close together, on all streets from 57th Street, north to Sutton Place, First, Second, and Third Avenues. Not so much the more commercial strips of Lexington and Madison, but on the densely residential Park Avenue, and, of course, the east side of Fifth Avenue.
Almost all visitors to the city were either gone or on their way, having been advised at the end of the previous week to leave without delay. The Mayor ordered the Police and the Army to seize the bus corporations in order to ferry thousands of tourists out to the airports.
Officials alerted foreign governments to the imminent disaster, and informed every U.S. embassy, worldwide, that all visitors were now banned from flying to any airport on the East Coast. They requested foreign airlines to bring in extra aircraft, empty, to assist with the transportation of tourists out of JFK, Newark, and La Guardia. Inbound aircraft with passengers were diverted to Toronto to refuel and return home.
The Port of New York was closed, except to outgoing ships, which were redirected south — unless you particularly wanted your big cruise liner or freighter to end up in Times Square.
All businesses not directly involved in transportation were closed — commercial or retail, the service industry, tourist attractions and places of entertainment. Schools, colleges, and universities.
The objective was partly to drastically reduce the amount of routine traffic on the streets of the city in order to provide space for the Army and Police, who were dispatching truckloads of important government and commercial documents stored in Manhattan by the big corporations.
The closing of shops and stores caused another specter to rear its snarling head in the planning offices of Tammany Hall: the chilling recollection of the Big Blackout in the summer of 1977 when a massive power failure plunged the city into almost total darkness. It had taken the criminal element about ten minutes to realize all the lights were out and the burglar alarms silenced, and several thousand looters and rioters went into immediate action. By first light, they had broken into stores citywide and stolen millions of dollars worth of merchandise.
The situation at hand was not quite that serious. There was plenty of electric power, and many extra thousands of Police and National Guard on duty. And looters themselves had to fear for their lives. Nonetheless, the great empty neighborhoods of New York City and stores full of merchandise would be standing unattended, tempting nefarious characters far and wide.
The police presence tended to gather in full force in certain areas, moving as one large unit from block to block, leaving desolate areas in their wake. Two serious break-ins along West 34th Street near Macy’s department store alerted the authorities, and the armed National Guard were moved into the silent areas the moment they arrived in the city.
Police cars drove slowly along the streets, loudly informing anyone who was listening that this was now a designated no-go area, closed to pedestrians and private cars, unless on official business. The cold-blooded warning was loud and clear:
The guidelines on the desk of the New York City Mayor had come directly from the White House, from the all-powerful Adm. Arnold Morgan, and refined by the Chiefs of Army Staff in the Pentagon. There was to be no
