When a lawyer told newlyweds Fraser Landry and Laura Papsin, “You’ll never forget this day,” they thought it was kind, if not a little obvious. Of course they wouldn’t forget. It was their wedding day.

They married in a courtroom at Osgoode Hall on Aug. 14, 2003. Not long after, at 4:11 p.m., a swath of the Northeastern U.S. and Ontario, including Toronto was abandoned by the power grid.

The couple didn’t know any of that, with no social media updates buzzing in the pockets of their guests. Their photographer was excited to be taking pictures inside the famed building, and so instead of sounding ominous, the advice strangers were doling out sounded strange, like: “I hope your photographer has enough light to take pictures.”

“I said yeah, he’s a professional photographer,” Landry recalled.

When they walked outside, a friend first told them about a “horrible power failure,” but it was really on the 40 minute drive to their reception at a nearby restaurant when the reality of the situation sunk in. Office towers had emptied to the streets. It was evening rush hour with no transit options, save for the odd bus, no traffic lights, and streets and sidewalks flooded with people coming up from the subways and down from the office towers. That’s when the reporter found them, looking a little crestfallen but “remarkably composed” on the sidewalk in front of the Rosewater Supper Club on Toronto St. Papsin was clutching her rose bouquet, wearing an off white Lowon-Pope gown, Landry was in his black suit. Both were telling their guests they’d reschedule. All they had was cake and alcohol.

“It was funny, the guy from the Star — he was a fashion reporter, and I guess when this thing hit, they kicked him out and told him to go and find the story. So he found us,’” Landry said.

(The Star story on Landry and Papsin from the next day was written by then-fashion reporter David Graham.)

At a nearby intersection, lawyer Peter Carayiannis was one of the many civilians directing traffic. He had been walking back to the office and was transfixed by the chaos around him.

Nobody was really angry, but nobody was moving either.

“Without ever consciously making the decision I found myself walking into the intersection in complete safety, because everything was totally locked,” he said. “I stood right in the middle, and whistled really hard, sort of put my fingers in my mouth. It was a real loud blast.”

Everybody stopped and looked at him, like, What are you going to do now? He looked back at them, and raised his arms, stopping one direction while he beckoned the other drivers forward.

He was soon wearing a reflective vest a city worker gave him and blowing a whistle a bicycle courier handed him. Drivers gave him high fives and bottles of water, and as the day wore on his expressions and gestures became somewhat grand, like a silent film star. (“Interestingly enough I have a very long history in amateur theatre going back to my university days,” he said.) When Star photographer Rick Madonik noticed him, Carayiannis was giving drivers the “skunk eye,” his hands in front of him in a don’t even think about it stance. It’s a look his sons would recognize now, he said.

He was an energy lawyer at the outset of his career in 2003, and when the lights went out he and a client were talking “about what we would do in the case of a catastrophic power outage,” he remembered. “I’m not joking. We were literally talking about the clause in the contract that would deal with the unlikely event.” They postponed the meeting, not realizing that 50 million people had lost power in Ontario and eight U.S. states, and it would take 41 hours for most to get it back.

The blackout was later traced to overloaded transmission lines in Ohio, and a domino effect across the grids of nearby states and provinces, including Ontario.

At least three people died in Ontario during the outage, including Lewis Wheelan, 22, who was found dead in his North York apartment after nearly 24 hours without power. Two years earlier, Wheelan lost his legs and an arm after he was electrocuted while clearing bush near hydro lines that were being repaired. He had needed constant air conditioning to keep his grafted skin from overheating, Star photographer Steve Russell reported.

When Carayiannis realized the entire downtown core was affected, he called his girlfriend (now wife) on an unaffected pay phone because she worked on a nearby floor in the upper reaches of Scotia Plaza. By the time she had walked down 60 flights of stairs with his stuff, he was directing traffic, and he couldn’t leave, could he? He was there for four hours until police took over.

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Back at the Rosewater Supper Club, Landry and Papsin’s wedding reception was cancelled for safety reasons, but the wedding party decamped to another restaurant around the corner, lit by skylight, for cake and drinks until it got dark.

“Many people actually made it,” Papsin said. “I think everyone really wanted to come because I got married for the first time at 44, and people were really happy.”

The couple went home at 10 p.m. and cobbled together a wedding dinner of cheese and bread. They wanted ice cream, but it was all melted.

“I think it was on Canada AM, I told the whole world because we didn’t have air conditioning in the house it was boiling hot, and so I didn’t sleep upstairs with my husband on my wedding night,” she said, laughing. “I slept down where it was cooler on the first floor, with cold compresses on my head.”

They had a proper reception in September at the Rosewater, and dressed up for a second time, which felt a little strange, but fun.

“It was just so ridiculous,” Landry began, “You had to laugh,” Papsin finished.

“It’s been the story forever,” she said.

Now with his own firm, Carayiannis is downtown a lot, and every time he passes the Bay-Adelaide intersection, he thinks of the blackout.

“I never want to minimize the seriousness of the event, because it was serious, and there were even a few fatalities that we learned about shortly afterwards,” he said, “but in the moment none of us understood the context of what was happening. I’d have to say yeah, it was a little bit fun.”

The next day, his photo was in the paper, and later, the BBC interviewed him.

“This picture, let’s be honest. It’s kind of a funny picture. I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s just funny to see a guy in a suit and tie do that.”

When the Star left him a voicemail on the eve of the 15th anniversary, he and his wife listened to it.

“We both giggled, because on the first anniversary, there were phone calls and on the fifth anniversary there were phone calls,” he said. “It’s very humbling and a nice thing, but I have to think its because of that photo. Everybody still gets a laugh at it.”