Gangs of looters raced through the streets yesterday, plundering stores and setting fires in four boroughs before the city's worst recorded outbreak of lawlessness subsided as darkness fell and the lights came on again.
By late last night more than 3,400 persons had been arrested, 558 policemen had been injured and property damage and losses had soared into the millions.
The marauders moved almost as if on signal at 9:30 p.m. power blackout and they continued into the daylight hours, even as New York City police were on a full summer mobilization.
Youths in the Bronx could be seen trucking off supermarket goods in shopping carts.
In Bushwick, Brooklyn, firemen were spraying hoses on a building ablaze on Hancock Ave. when looters across the way tried to break into a store. The firemen turned around and played the hose on the looters until they fled.
And as police continued to truck suspected looters in for booking, court authorities declared an emergency and - over the protest of Legal Aid lawyers - ordered suspects held at Rikers Island. And when Rikers could no longer handle the crowd, the Beame administration got court permission to reopen the Men's House of Detention, which had been ordered shut by a federal judge in 1974.
The looters had no pattern; hit-and-run break-ins struck parts of Manhattan and Queens and whole streets of stores were ripped off in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
The Bronx appeared hardest hit, particularly along stretches of the Grand Concourse. "They wiped out the guts of this neighborhood," said Patrolman Ed Growler of the 46th Precinct.
In Manhattan, after an early morning tour of the lower East Side and East Harlem on upper Third Ave., Deputy Mayor Osborn Elliott called it a "catastrophe."
In the Bronx, thieves used the cover of darkness to steal 50 new Pontiacs from Ace Pontiac, 1921 Jerome Ave. at 177th St. When the cars were recovered later in parts of the city, they were found stripped clean of parts.
But the city was not the only victim; Yonkers and neighboring community in Westchester County also reported outbreaks of looting, most of it happening within 15 minutes after the blackout.
In Yonkers, a molotov cocktail and eggs were thrown at passing patrol cars. Twenty persons were arrested for looting in Getty Square, near City Hall.
In the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, youths were seen driving their car up on the sidewalk to a targeted store. Ropes or chains were tied between the protective grating of the store and the car's back bumper. The car then pulled away, the grating tumbled off, and the looters swept into the store.
Police accounts told of widespread looting along a 20-block stretch of Flatbush Ave. between Church and Lenox Aves. and Utica Ave.
At one fire on Flatbush Ave., youths could be heard screaming, "Burn, baby, burn," a reference to the ghetto rioting of the 1960s. When a reporter told a policeman about this at 9 a.m., the cop yelled back: "Tell the mayor to put it out himself."
In the end, it was the vignettes that told the true horror.
Norman Gallen, and his wife, both 49, came to their clothing store at 340 Myrtle Ave. near Adelphi St. in Fort Green, Brooklyn, just after 7:30 a.m. and found the place in shambles. Clothing had been ripped off storefront mannequins and the interior of the store had been plundered.
"I will not come back to this neighborhood," Gallen said, "I cannot." Gallen said the store had been founded by his grandfather in 1900. Even as he talked, Gallen was shooing youngsters away from the store. One of the youngsters was 6.