NYC blackout — equipment looting seeds 'a thousand new DJs'
A lightning strike on a Hudson Valley substation cascades into a 25-hour blackout across New York City. Widespread looting hits electronics stores in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem — including turntable, mixer, and amplifier inventory. Histories of hip-hop credit the looted equipment with multiplying the number of working DJs in the Bronx and beyond, accelerating the spread of the still-emergent culture.
Why it matters
On July 13, 1977, lightning hit a substation in Westchester and New York City went dark for 25 hours. The part that matters here is what happened next. People looted. A lot of the people doing the looting hit electronics stores. A lot of the inventory in those electronics stores was DJ equipment. Turntables. Mixers. Amps. The kind of gear that, the day before, cost more than a month of rent in the Bronx. By the time the lights came back on, the number of working DJs in the Bronx had multiplied from dozens to thousands. Grandmaster Caz says so. Disco King Mario says so. Every history of the early scene from Jeff Chang on down says so. The culture was already happening on August 11, 1973. The blackout is what made it scale. If you ever wondered how a small Bronx-party thing became a city-wide thing inside of two years, that is most of the answer.
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