NEWARK — New Jersey's most populous city has power back less than 24 hours after Hurricane Sandy delivered a knockout blow Monday night.

Most parts of Newark, Elizabeth and Newark Airport got power back at about 5 p.m. today, said Public Service Electric & Gas spokeswoman Kathy Fitzgerald.

“There’s a lot of excitement about it here,” said Fitzgerald from the company’s command center in its Newark office tower. “The city is up and running. There may be onesies and twosies out, but basically the city is back in power.”

At about 10 p.m. tonight, a large section of downtown Newark lit up extending from Broad and Market streets to Route 21.

Street signs turned on and people hunkered down in a hotel on Broad Street cheered as the hotel went from generator to power.

Andreka Facey, 26, a flight attendant from Newark, said the lights flickered, and then, "boom, there it went," she said, as she looked out a window as a large sign came to life.

Her main concern was that the airport was open. "I'll be working tomorrow, probably," she said.

The news got to Ralph Izzo, CEO of parent company PSEG, as he spoke on a call with industry leaders and President Barack Obama.

“Obama said, ‘Great work, Ralph!’” Fitzgerald recalled. “The operations people all came in to hear the president.”

Many small outages in the cities may remain because of trees and wires down, but on a macro level, Fitzgerald said, the deed is done.

The restoration should bring PSE&G’s overall outage number down from a number that reached 1.4 million just before the restoration.

NOTE TO READERS: Please note not all of Newark has power back. Many commenters have pointed that out--while the headline could be interpreted that way, further detail in the story shows that central Newark and sections like the airport were restored, but many outages remained. As of Thursday night at 8 p.m., that meant 57,932 customers in New Jersey's biggest city still didn't have power back.

Staff writer Tomas Dinges contributed to this report.

Previous coverage:

• Power outages from Hurricane Sandy climb as most of N.J. is still in the dark

• Hurricane Sandy leaves more than a million without power

