The City That Never Sleeps -- No Matter What

The night Manhattan went into shutdown

By Sebastian Fest | Aug 28, 2011, 16:57 GMT

New York - It was 6.53 am (1153 GMT) on Sunday when CNN star anchor Anderson Cooper said what his audience had been wondering for a long time by then.

'I'm really surprised. Is this the strongest we will have in terms of rain?' Cooper asked.

He noted that this was actually good news, but New Yorkers had been told to expect something else from Hurricane Irene. Residents of Manhattan, in particular, had been locked in at home for hours, ahead of an impending disaster that television had been hyping for two days.

A couple of hours after Cooper spoke his mind and that of many thousands of others, Hurricane Irene was degraded to a tropical storm - a very dangerous one, yes, but not even a hurricane.

Cooper was by then soaked, after spending all night at a street corner in Greenwich Village. But few would have known better than him that what television had been saying and showing was so different from the reality in Manhattan.

In fact, the underwhelming nature of the storm is explained by the difficulties associated with a largely unpredictable, multifaceted natural phenomenon.

'There's some internal dynamics of the storm that we don't completely understand,' hurricane expert Todd Kimberlain told The New York Times from Miami.

But the hype of recent days also have to do with a different dynamic, that of the media, and with the difficulty for an outsider of understanding a huge city like New York.

If one hears that a hurricane is hitting the Big Apple, the first image that comes to mind for millions of people around the world is that of a massive cloud funnel approaching the Empire State Building.

But there is a lot more to New York than the Empire State Building, and a lot more than even Manhattan. The state of New York stretches out over 122,000 square kilometres and holds 19 million people. The city, with its five boroughs, covers 780 square kilometres and holds 8 million people. And Manhattan, the crown jewel, crams 1.5 million people in just 59 square kilometres.

Coastal areas like Long Island and portions of Queens were clearly at risk from the wind and flooding associated with Irene, as were coastal areas in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland or New Jersey. People died in these places, and there were serious powercuts.

And with the memory of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans still fresh in the minds of most, the insistence of the authorities on warnings and evacuations was well justified.

Indeed, even with the warnings, police had their work cut out for them - as shown by the fact that on Saturday police needed to rescue two men who were practicing extreme kayaking in the turbulent waters off Staten Island.

The difference lay between what was said would happen - Manhattan swept by superstrong winds that were to be made worse by the funnel effect of its skyscrapers - and what actually did happen.

The worst of the cyclone was to hit the city between 3 and 9 am, but those times came and went in relative calm. Irene is still around, it is still unpredictable and it could indeed regain strength, but the truth is that shortly before 10 am the sun actually showed through the grey clouds over Manhattan.

Low-lying areas like Battery Park and the Lower East Side did suffer flooding, but the higher land that makes up most of the island actually appeared unscathed.

The early hours of the morning are a sort of no man's land, neither night nor day. And residents of Manhattan faced quite a challenge: they were supposed to watch television to be told what was happening on their very island, but not venture out.

In fact, what the television showed was a lot more exciting than what was actually going on in the street: a mix of the most striking images of Irene's effects on the whole of the East Coast of the United States, with reporters struggling in the wind and the rain against a backdrop of wild waves beating the shore.

Irene was the single topic on television overnight, and coverage was guaranteed to have an effect.

The streets of Manhattan had started to empty out on Saturday afternoon, and The City That Never Sleeps became a striking, silent night-time urbanscape.

New Yorkers did, however, stay true to themselves: they did not sleep. They were locked in at home, not so much due to the rain or the wind but just because there was nothing to do outside.