'You just got to inhale the hallways here, babycakes," said Dr Joy Brown of WOR Radio in New York, where there was no air conditioning in the studios, just a back-up electrical generator.
"The whiff is something else. It'll colour your hair. It'll fry your pancakes. This is no deodorant commercial, no way."
Outside the radio station, the city was largely dark, accentuated by an odd light: a woman carrying a candle around a corner, car headlights painting up the darkness, cops swinging flashlights, tiki-lit parties down by the river where the breeze blew, an older man taking the stairs of his apartment building by the light of his Zippo, the one he once used in Vietnam.
To get a lesson in the human a city needs to lose its power: it introduces rawness at its best and worst. It's happened a few times in the history of New York - most notably in November 1965 and July of 1977. On the first occasion it was a city of Jimmy Stewarts, by all accounts: everyone was helping one another out and it was, for a day, that wonderful life. In 1977 the memory is different - the skyline was lit up and painted with arson. There were almost 4,000 arrests. Looting erupted everywhere, even along Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The audacious looters even paused a moment to try on different-sized suits in Brooks Brothers.
Every period gets a suit that fits, an image, a moment, a time that becomes representative of who we are and where we have arrived - and so it was with bated breath that New Yorkers wondered what might happen on Thursday at 4.11 in the afternoon when the computers went dead, the answering machines stopped answering, the subways halted beneath the river, the cable car swung just above Roosevelt Island, the ATMs stopped giving out money, the ice cream began melting, and the pilots saw the landing lights flicker. For a moment the memory of 9-11 flickered into the consciousness.
Suddenly the city was like a dream of the city and, with the juice out, it became a conversation with the way things are.
By early Friday morning - when the power was returning and the city rehydrated from the 15-hour shock - it was clear that New York had largely survived the dress rehearsal. One person had died when she collapsed after descending the stairs at the MetLife building, but the hospitals had managed on their back-up systems and had even performed operations by flashlight. The traffic system was the nightmare that could be expected, but Citizens Joe and Jane were out on the avenues directing the flow. The cops took up the slack elsewhere. Diesel trains rescued those stuck in the tunnels. Hot-dog vendors jacked up prices but that's New York: a buck is no good unless it can be tripled.
On Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, where some buildings are still gutted from the riots in 1977, things were quiet. A shoe shop was plundered and some other places opened for unasked business - but for the most part people were out on their stoops getting to know their neighbours all over again.
If there's anything good about a blackout it's how it surprises us into re-acquainting ourselves with the parts that live beyond TV, the air conditioner, the electric lights. One loneliness added to another loneliness becomes an ingenious partnership: nine months from now they'll be glad for the electricity in the hospitals. There's a strange democracy at work here: if you lived in a penthouse at the top of a skyscraper you either slept downstairs, or you made the weary climb. It was tough luck for the rich and the poor alike. The economics of being human are laid bare when darkness falls: profiteering, generosity, hatred, kinship and laughter can make an interesting stew.
There were people out on the rooftops in Manhattan on Thursday, staring at the stars. There probably won't ever be a time when the Big Dipper can be seen from Fifth Avenue quite as clearly. It was an exercise in the wonderful. People were talking to each other, neighbours again. A concert went ahead in Central Park. Some theatres brought their plays outdoors and lit the action with candles. There was the awareness that everyone was in the centre of a story, that this would be something they could talk about, if not 20 years from now, at least tomorrow. Restaurants put their tables and chairs outside and the owners lit up the unlikely scenario with their car headlights. People, no doubt, fell in love: it was a city of candlelight.
It was also an exercise in the manner in which we have learned to trust our technology too deeply - the toilets that operate on light sensors overflowed; electronic hotel keys didn't work; water pumps didn't bring water and credit machines were defunct.
Of course there was the looming echo of 9-11: the buses were packed, nerves were set on edge, groups gathered around boom boxes. Crowds streamed up the avenues but there was no dust nor horror following them this time - the word got out very soon that the incident was not terror-related. Many of the stories that people shared as they wandered uptown, or across the bridges, were of the who, what, where, when, how and why of that unforgettable September day. Perhaps New Yorkers have learned. Or perhaps there still is a dull sense of shock, the peculiar backspin of memory.
The administration on Thursday night chose to blame the Canadian power system - if anything is clear from American politics in recent times it's that there always has to be a foreign enemy. But another thing is clear also - the ordinary American doesn't really believe much of the tripe that is shoved their way. They have become weary of the politician too quick to jump to conclusions. There is no soundbite here, no easy answer. Most people are weary of cliches, political and otherwise, that are directed their way.
All they had to do was look around on Thursday night - the city that supposedly never sleeps had hundreds dozing on its pavements.
Colum McCann is an Irish writer living in New York. His latest novel is Dancer.
Garret FitzGerald is on holiday.