Flights resumed, but slowly. The New York Stock Exchange got back to business, but on generator power. In hard-hit New Jersey, the National Guard brought supplies to stranded residents while President Barack Obama toured the ravaged coast.
And with the subways still down, great numbers of people walked across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan in a reverse of the exodus of 9/11.
Two days after Superstorm Sandy rampaged across the Northeast, killing at least 72 people, New York and New Jersey struggled Wednesday to find their way. Swaths of the region were still without power.
At luxury hotels and drugstores and Starbucks shops that bubbled back to life, people clustered around outlets and electrical strips, desperate to recharge their phones. In the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, a line of people filled pails with water from a fire hydrant. Two children used jack-o’-lantern trick-or-treat buckets.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the agency that runs New York City’s subways, buses and commuter rails is waiving fares today and Friday to help ease recovery from the superstorm. He said Wednesday the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fare waivers are to encourage people to use mass transit instead of driving into the city.
Cuomo said parts of the subway would begin running again today and three of seven tunnels under the East River had been pumped free of water, removing a major obstacle to restoring full service.
“We are going to need some patience and some tolerance,” he said.
On Wednesday, both were frayed. Bus service was free but delayed, and New Yorkers jammed on, crowding buses so heavily that they skipped stops and rolled past hordes of waiting passengers.
New York City buses serve 2.3 million people on an average day, and two days after the storm they were trying to handle many of the 5.5 million daily subway riders, too.
As far west as Wisconsin and south to the Carolinas, more than 6 million homes and businesses were still without power, including about 650,000 in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
The mayor said 500 patients were being evacuated from Bellevue Hospital because of storm damage. The hospital has run on generators since the storm. About 300 patients were evacuated from another Manhattan hospital Monday after it lost generator power.
Bloomberg also canceled school the rest of the week, and the Brooklyn Nets, who just moved from New Jersey, scratched their home opener against the Knicks today.
Still, there were signs that the area was flickering back to life and wasn’t as isolated as it was a day earlier.
Flights resumed at Kennedy and Newark airports on what authorities described as a very limited schedule. Nothing was taking off or landing at LaGuardia, which suffered far worse damage. Amtrak said trains will start running in and out of New York again on Friday.
The stock exchange, operating on backup generators, came back to life after its first two-day weather shutdown since the blizzard of 1888. Mayor Michael Bloomberg rang the opening bell to whoops from traders below.
“We jokingly said this morning we may be the only building south of midtown that has water, lights and food,” said Duncan Niederauer, CEO of the company that runs the exchange, in hard-hit lower Manhattan.
Most Broadway shows returned for Wednesday matinees and evening shows.
Across the Hudson River in New Jersey, National Guardsmen in trucks delivered ready-to-eat meals and other supplies to heavily flooded Hoboken and rushed to evacuate people from the city’s high-rises and brownstones. The mayor’s office put out a plea for people to bring boats to City Hall for use in rescuing victims.
City officials have not reported any fatalities in Hoboken so far. Among the first to be rescued during the night were two babies, one 5 days old and another 3 weeks old. By midday Wednesday, the trucks at the unloading point by City Hall were bringing older people, including several in wheelchairs, and many families with babies and small children.
Robyn Pecarsky, who was eight months’ pregnant, was helped down from the back of a truck with her two children, who are 5 and 8.
“We saw the National Guard and I sent my husband to tell them he had to get his pregnant wife out,” Pecarsky said.
Along the New Jersey coast, some of the state’s barrier islands, which took a direct hit from Sandy on Monday night, remained all but cut off.
Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took a helicopter tour of the devastated areas.
“We are here for you,” Obama said in Brigantine, N.J. “We are not going to tolerate red tape. We are not going to tolerate bureaucracy.”
In New York, masses of people walked shoulder-to-shoulder across the Brooklyn Bridge to get into Manhattan for work, reminiscent of the escape scenes from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack and the blackout of 2003.
They entered an island sharply divided between those who had power and those who did not.
In Manhattan at night, it was possible to walk downtown along an avenue and move in an instant from a mostly normal New York scene — delis open, people milling outside bars — into a pitch-black cityscape, with police flares marking intersections.
People who did have power took to social media to offer help to neighbors.
“I have power and hot water. If anyone needs a shower or to charge some gadgets or just wants to bask in the beauty of artificial light, hit me up,” Rob Hart of Staten Island posted on Facebook.
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A respected New York steakhouse in the blackout zone, Old Homestead, realized its meat was going to go bad and decided to grill what was left and sell steaks on the sidewalk for $10. A center-cut sirloin usually goes for $47.
“Give back to the people of New York,” said Greg Sherry, the steakhouse’s co-owner. He said it had served nearly 700 people on Wednesday.
Simon Massey and his 9-year-old son, Henry, took one last walk near their powerless apartment in downtown Manhattan before decamping to a friend’s place in Brooklyn where the electricity worked.
“We’re jumping ship,” he said. “We gorged on eggs and sausage this morning before everything goes bad. We don’t want to spend another three or four days here.”
They live on the 10th floor of a 32-floor building, where they were flushing the toilet with water from their filled tub and cooking on their gas stove. They found their way down the stairs with glowsticks and flashlights, and rationed iPad and phone use.
“I’m feeling scared,” said Henry, who was home from third grade for a third straight day. “It just feels really, really weird. New York’s not supposed to be this quiet.”
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