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In the meantime here is a video of Chloe dancing to Rock You Like A Hurricane.

Source: blip

At the boundary, around 40th Street on the East Side, a unusual makeshift community has sprung up, one where the basic building blocks of a New York neighborhood — a pizza place, an unremarkable deli, a bank — have become an oasis. Late Wednesday night, by the hundreds, the people from downtown emerged from the cold, enveloping darkness, some with flashlights, some with towels just in case they found a place to shower, some with gallon containers to fill with water to flush the toilet.

They stepped into the bright Midtown at East 39th Street at the place where the blackout ends.

Where the City of Darkness Meets the City of Light (via thisistheverge)

Fantastic piece. Another great bit:

The Midtown tourists take pictures through the large picture windows, capturing what may be the closest they will come to the City of Darkness.

“They say, ‘Look at these poor people,’” said Agata Shultz, 19, who walked up from the East Village and sat on a heated window ledge reading philosophy in Polish and checking her e-mail.”

I keep saying to everyone how bizarre this blackout divide is. Yesterday Rachel and I hiked 53 blocks north with backpacks of clothes and laptops to stay with friends. After two nights of no power (and a day before that of holing up during the actual storm); after daily visits from our friend Tom, who biked around, charmed his way into our building (buzzers need power) and brought news of the world; after a walk through the East Village with every other resident wandering around with nothing to do, and elatedly buying Snickers and a fresh bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich from one of several open bodegas — after all this, we reached 38th Street and saw open restaurants, barber shops, nail salons, jewelry stores. In the two days we’d spent in a sort of genial post-apocalyptic wasteland, life uptown had gotten pretty damn normal.

The contrast was sharpened by walking from the eclectically-classed East Village to the Upper East Side. This is already an unusually fancy part of town, and it’s just fucking bizarre, after conserving phone batteries for three days, to see so many fur coats, to default to Starbucks like everyone else and hear their trademarked size orders — “venti skim latte” stops being a cliche and is once again hilarious when yesterday you could only get coffee from a deli with the lights off.

And to know that thousands of people are still down there, that many people don’t have friends in the powered zone happy to take them in, that many are old and stuck and can’t flush their toilets, and that some people are getting pretty angry about the lack of emergency aid.

Ugh, I talked myself out of feeling shitty about having to wash my underwear in the sink.

(via nickdouglas)

(via nickdouglas)

Source: The New York Times