Many stories came from the darkness of Saturday night’s major blackout.
Strangers comforted neighbors they’d never met, restaurants gave customers meals on the house, and everyday heroes volunteered to direct traffic at busy intersections.
Here, several New Yorkers share their tales of the Big Apple blackout.
Dancing in the dark
At Columbus Circle, dance instructor Rebecca Miller, 34, was learning new choreography at studio 305 Fitness with a troupe of other dancers when the room was plunged into darkness.
At first, the group thought their professional lights and music had blown a fuse in the building — until they went to the street and saw the whole block was dark.
A music video shows the troupe bumping and grinding until the lights and music in the 58th Street studio suddenly hit the fritz.
Miller was the last to leave the studio before a pedicab driver offered to give her a lift to the nearest subway.
Stairwell Samaritan
When the lights flickered out at his Upper West Side hotel around 6:47 p.m., Rishi Rampersad decided to take the emergency stairs to get back to his third-floor room.
In the pitch black, the New Jersey man, 30, was shocked to find a frightened woman needing his help.
“I reached the third floor and I heard this woman saying, ‘Could you help me?'” Rampersad, a UPS worker, told The Post.
“I look up and she’s there just clinging onto the railing. I was in shock,” he said.
The man used his cellphone flashlight to guide the woman back to her room — but said she was far braver then him for attempting to walk eight flights without a flashlight.
“She was very happy to see me.”
When life gives you lemons
Giovani Morales and Greg Driscoll inside Empanada MamaNatan DvirFrancesco’s Pizzeria at 186 Columbus became a beacon of light in a pitch-black Upper West Side, serving slices of cheese when everyone else shut up shop.
“All the restaurants on the block were closed because of the blackout, but we knew people would be hungry,” employee Isabel Olivares said.
“Even though we closed the kitchen, we kept serving slices. The restaurant was full and people we talking and drinking beers.”
They closed at just before 10 p.m. that night, with not a slice left in the house.
Empanada Mama on Ninth Avenue also made the most of the blackout, slinging its fried delicacies for cash on the sidewalk after the outage emptied the full restaurant.
“We pulled out all our empanadas and set them up outside,” general manager Giovanni Morales said. “We sold every single one.”
Chaos and kindness on the rails
A dark subway station during Manhattan’s blackoutAnnie WermielDeep underground Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, fashion stylist Jeanie Powers tried her best to keep others calm when their A train became stranded for three hours due to electrical issues.
The Tribeca woman said strap-hangers became “crazy” when they stopped in a tunnel with no cell service and received no updates from the driver — leading people to fearfully speculate a Manhattan terror attack.
“Nobody knew what was going on,” Powers said. “There was one older woman on her way to work who started panicking. People were trying to calm her down.”
Powers ended up getting out at Jay Street, splitting an Uber with a new friend: a fellow passenger who happened to be a federal judge.
“After living through 9/11, I feel like we can get through anything,” she said.



