Tie-clad traders at the Chicago Stock Exchange crowded city sidewalks, conducting business by cellular phone.
Specialty coffee shops lacked hot water and were forced to import mass-produced java from a nearby McDonald’s.
A city worker raced from street light to street light quickly hanging stop signs to direct the creeping traffic.
“It’s almost like New York City,” observed Kathie Noble of New Jersey, a guest at the darkened Congress Hotel and Convention Center, where bellhops armed themselves with flashlights Thursday morning.
These were just some of the many frustrating, curious scenes that played out Thursday in downtown Chicago as electrical power was extinguished in a large segment of the Loop, plunging the city into an unwelcome blackout that surely raised the blood pressure levels of an untold number of Chicagoans and city visitors.
Unrushed lunch
Things were quiet along West Randolph Street, where the strip’s typically bustling restaurants remained dark during the lunch hour.
Nearby warehouses likewise stood mute, their loading docks battened shut and their front doors locked off by gates as a few straggling workers stood in knots on the sidewalk.
At the Blue Point Oyster Bar, 741 W. Randolph St., manager Karen Lee said every minute the power stayed out during the lunch rush translated to a more than $16 loss in food sales–before factoring in payroll costs. She said the restaurant was out $1,000 by 12:30 p.m., and she worried that the tens of thousands of dollars of perishable seafood in the restaurant’s coolers would go bad if power were not restored before long.
“When the power went out, we closed all our coolers and sent people home,” Lee said. “We’re not opening the coolers. We have no ice. . . . Nothing works.”
Nearby, Dave Zarkin, a bartender at Bar Louie, 123 N. Halsted St., said without electricity, there was no cold beer and, thus, no customers.
“You live on your tips. It’s a whole day’s pay,” Zarkin said. “It stinks.”
At the Holiday Grill & Bar, 740 W. Randolph St., the power was out but the bar was open, albeit with a chalkboard out front reading “Hey ComEd What do you do with your power?”
Nowhere to go
For too long Thursday afternoon, Elena Gonzalez and Felix Garcia virtually were homeless.
Their two young children were crying and fidgeting in their parents’ arms–a 10-month-old girl in Gonzalez’s, a 2-year-old boy in Garcia’s–and a haven for the two toddlers was not to be found in much of the Loop, where the buildings were shrouded in an eerie mid-afternoon darkness.
“We have nowhere to go,” an exasperated Gonzalez lamented, sitting on carpeted steps just inside the Congress Hotel at Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway.
The couple had been staying at the Congress in between selling their house and moving into a new one, and hotel employees would not allow guests to roam the hotel’s pitch-black hallways in search of their rooms. Escaping by car was out of the question, as well, because the elevators to the hotel parking garage were idled. Swirling around the four were frantic bellhops, with flashlights in hand, trying to make peace with angry guests.
Disrupted dialysis
Minnie Robinson, 78, was one of 30 patients receiving dialysis at the Chicago Kidney Center at 820 W. Jackson St. when the power snapped, forcing her to sit and wait for care.
Nurses quickly took the patients off the machines, but five hours later, Robinson had no idea where she was going to get her thrice-weekly treatments. She wasn’t even sure how she was going to get a ride home that late in the day.
“I’m so sick of sitting down,” she said from her wheelchair, situated in a dark waiting room.
The van company that takes her to her West Side home was delayed because of the outage, and she probably now would be forced to make a return trip to the center on Saturday.
“ComEd has got too many outages for me,” she said.
Fish tales
The usually bustling Fulton Street marketplace largely was silent Thursday, as dozens of shopkeepers coped with the power outage. Orders went unfilled, delivery trucks remained empty and some employees were sent home by early afternoon, when it became clear the bulk of the day’s business was lost.
And the aroma of meat and fish that often permeates the marketplace was mixed with a little sweat, as shopkeepers scrambled to find as much dry ice and as many generators as they could.
Power in the marketplace went down around 10 a.m. Many shopkeepers–wholesalers of pork, beef and chicken to Chicago restaurants and grocery stores–estimated the outage would cost them thousands.
“It looks like a Sunday,” observed Bob Miller, an employee of Moesle Meat Co. 853 W. Fulton St.
Nealey Food Co., was an exception, however. Portable generators coincidentally arrived during the outage as part of the company’s efforts to prepare for Y2K.
“We are going to be Y2K compliant,” said John Riezinger, the engineer for Nealey Foods. “It was just like at home, the lights go out–what can you do?”
High-rise heroes
Leigh Gilmore, who works for Maritz Travel Co., waited almost three hours for firefighters to evacuate her from her high-rise office at 10 S. Riverside Plaza, but she wasn’t complaining.
Once firefighters arrived about 12:45 p.m., they carried Gilmore– and the motorized scooter she uses–down 14 flights of stairs.
“They had to stop every few floors because those guys were sweating bullets,” said Gilmore, 40.
Once safely on the ground, Gilmore could only give thanks.
“I told the squad, `You’re my stars,’ ” she said.
Mission possible
At Pacific Garden Mission in the 600 block of South State Street, residents such as Jonah Kinsey, 39, were forced to enter in the back, where there was more daylight to examine the faces of those who were allowed in.
“They want to make sure you’re not drunk or on drugs, so they need to take a good look at you,” said Kinsey, who said he sells newspapers on street corners.
The homeless shelter’s food service director, Floyd Turnbull, 46, was just starting to prepare the night’s dinner of fried eggplant, chicken and rotini pasta when the power shut down.
Within minutes, though, Turnbull said he got a call from the Salvation Army, offering to bring by hot meals for 500 for dinner.
Tepid on tap
At Union Station, where trains were operating on schedule, the stench greeting passengers was the most obvious sign something had gone awry. Several portable toilets had been set up outside the entrance because water quit running, and the air conditioning quick working too.
Knocking off early for the day sent many people flocking into taverns around town, as well as into a favorite tavern inside the station.
One of the regulars at The Snuggery bar inside the train station, Frank Meenaghan, an Oak Park carpenter, said the beer and tavern were both a little warm for his liking, but that didn’t stop him and a bevy of others from sipping draft brew from plastic cups.
“I just thank God it’s not 95 degrees outside,” he said.
Work at home
At 10 S. Riverside Plaza, a 22-floor steel skyscraper overlooking the Chicago River, about 80 employees huddled around the front of the building after the electricity went out about 10 a.m.
A maintenance crew was called to carry disabled people from the building and workers wondered whether they would be able to return to the office Friday.
“I was just sitting by my computer and it went zap,” said Jessica Staley-Carroll, an accounts coordinator for Bernard Hodes Advertising, located inside the building. “Everything in the room went zap–the phone, the computer the air conditioner, everything.”
About 40 workers held an impromptu meeting and decided to work from home on Friday using cell phones and laptop computers.
Nevertheless, the power interruption greatly irritated Warren Marwedell, an attorney in building.
“I’m not surprised,” he said, obviously disgusted. “Commonwealth Edison has the most antiquated equipment around. Everyone has turned their head to this, but now there is no avoiding it.”
He recalled other outages, such as one caused over the weekend when a squirrel ran into power equipment.
“What was there today?” he asked. “There was no big storm. There was no squirrel.”
Goodbye travel plans
Mark Ginnard watched with mounting exasperation Thursday afternoon as government workers streamed out of the Kluczynski Federal Building, 230 S. Dearborn St.
The 35-year-old automotive designer from Detroit paced in front on the building, collecting his thoughts and calculating what the building’s evacuation could cost him–more than $1,000, he figured, and Friday’s business trip to Amsterdam.
Ginnard said he and about 30 others were in line at the Chicago Passport Agency on the third floor when an announcement came over the public address system about 2:15 p.m: The building would be emptied as a precaution, in case the nearby power outage reached it as well.
Some of those in line figured they were only minutes from getting their passports. “We were so close,” Ginnard said. “There were some pretty steamed people.”
Ginnard was left holding a $750 non-refundable round-trip ticket from Detroit to Amsterdam Friday–but not the passport necessary to get there.
“It’s almost like somebody up there is telling me not to fly on Friday the 13th,” Ginnard said.
If he couldn’t make the Friday airplane or persuade Northwest Airlines to allow him on a later flight, Ginnard said, he’d be out the cost of the ticket since he was traveling on his own dime.
In the meantime, he was off to postpone his return to Detroit, shell out $135 to stay at a nearby hotel and work the phones to try to reschedule his overseas trip.
“I’m gambling these doors are going to be open,” Ginnard said, gesturing at the federal building, “and I can pick (the passport) up in the morning.”
Meanwhile, up on the 36th floor, in the office of the General Services Administration, was dedicated public relations official Rebecca Hood, who stayed long past the exodus to field phone calls from reporters.
“As long as my computer wants to stay on and my phone works, I’ll be here,” Hood said after the building was nearly empty. “But I just know I’m going to be taking my work home later. Thank God for laptops.”
