This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A power outage crippled the tourist-filled heart of Manhattan just as Saturday night Broadway shows were set to go on, sending theatregoers spilling into siren-filled streets, knocking out Times Square’s towering electronic screens and bringing subway lines to a near halt.

Electricity was restored to customers and businesses in midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side by about midnight.

John McAvoy, the CEO of energy provider Con Edison, said a problem at a substation caused the power failure at 6.47pm, affecting 73,000 customers for more than three hours along a 30-block stretch from Times Square to 72nd Street and Broadway, and spreading to the Rockefeller Center.

McAvoy said the exact cause of the blackout would not be known until an investigation was completed.

Sahid Abraham (@Sahid0) Times Square is down, i repeat, Times Square is down. This is not a drill!! #Blackout #NYC pic.twitter.com/8IUfER7ozl

The temperature was around 28C (82F) as the sun set, challenging the city’s power grid, but not as steaming as Manhattan can get in July.

Power went out early on Saturday evening at much of the Rockefeller Center, reaching the Upper West Side and knocking out traffic lights.

A big cheer went up among Upper West Side residents when power flickered back on at about 10.30 pm. For hours before that, doormen stood with flashlights in the darkened entrances of upmarket apartment buildings along Central Park West, directing residents to walk up flights of stairs to their apartments, with all elevators out.

Police directed traffic at intersections as pedestrians and bikes weaved through the dark.

The failure came on the anniversary of the 1977 New York City outage that left most of the city without power.

The New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, said in a statement that although no injuries were reported “the fact that it happened at all is unacceptable”. He said the state’s department of public service would investigate.

He said the outage posed a safety risk.

“You just can’t have a power outage of this magnitude in this city,” Cuomo said. “It is too dangerous, the potential for public safety risk and chaos is too high. We just can’t have a system that does that, it’s that simple at the end of the day.”

Most Broadway musicals and plays cancelled their Saturday evening shows, including Hadestown, which last month won the Tony award for best musical. Several cast members from the musical Come From Away held an impromptu performance in the street outside the theatre for disappointed audience members.

angela pinsky (@AngelaPinsky) Very nice. Cast of @hadestown singing to the disappointed audience about the #blackout. pic.twitter.com/zIHuozHIGu

The outage also hit Madison Square Garden, where Jennifer Lopez was performing on Saturday night. Attendees said the concert went dark about 9.30pm in the middle of Lopez’s fourth song of the night. The arena was later evacuated. And at Penn station, officials were using backup generators to keep the lights on.

Both Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts were evacuated.

When the lights went out early on Saturday evening, thousands of people streamed out of darkened Manhattan buildings. They crowded Broadway, where there was bumper-to-bumper traffic, emergency vehicle sirens and honking car horns.

People in the neighbourhood commonly known as Hell’s Kitchen began directing traffic themselves as stoplights and walking signs went dark.

Ginger Tidwell, a dance teacher and Upper West Side resident, was about to order at a West Side diner on Broadway and West 69th Street just before 7pm. “When the lights started flickering, and then went out, we got up and left, walking up Broadway with all the traffic lights out and businesses dark,” she said.

But once they got to West 72nd Street, they found another diner that was open and had power.

“It was still sunny and everyone just came out to the street because they lost power and air-conditioning; it was super crowded,” she said. “Everyone was hanging out on the street on a nice night. All you could hear was fire trucks up and down Broadway. All of Broadway was without traffic lights.”

Underground, the entire subway system was affected. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said four Manhattan stations were closed to the public at Columbus Circle, Rockefeller Center, Hudson Yards and Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street. But he said train operators were able to manually change the signals and bring at least one car into stations so passengers could get off.