There were 45,000 customers without power in New York, most of them in Midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side, the utility company said.
The power outage sent people into intersections to direct traffic, brought at least one troupe from a canceled Broadway show out to perform for fans on a crowded sidewalk, and prompted tourists and locals to point smart phones at darkened neon signs in Times Square and other places.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was campaigning for president in Iowa, said it appears the outage was the result of a mechanical problem in the electrical grid. “This appears to be something that just went wrong in the way that they transmit power from one part of the city to another,” he told CNN. “It sounds like it is addressable in a reasonable amount of time.”
