A FONDUE pot and a pack of Sterno helped Nicole Miller, the fashion designer, weather Hurricane Sandy and the stubbornly persistent blackout that followed it in the apartment she shares with her family on the 10th floor of a building in TriBeCa.

“Last night I made a mean fondue,” Ms. Miller said Wednesday, mildly surprised that so many neighbors seemed to have cleared out. “And this morning, I made my coffee in the same pot. We were pretty well prepared, and my husband and son are fine with roughing it.”

The New York flood is usually a guest at other addresses — think of the untold number of wind-swept television shots over the years from more nautical neighborhoods like Sea Gate in Brooklyn or City Island in the Bronx.

But this storm offered a powerful reminder that the island of Manhattan is, in fact, an island. For a spell the storm even shut down nearly all the city’s bridges and tunnels — temporarily blocking, as a Manhattanite with a suitably Saul Steinberg view of the world might put it, the only major points of access that the mainland United States had to Manhattan.