My own (brilliant) personal account:
At about 2:45 PM local time I took the Holland Tunnel across the Hudson River on to Manhattan to have a late lunch with my girlfriend who lives in the northern Financial District in the lower end of Manhattan. At about 3:25 PM we got up to the restaurant she chose, vaguely north of the intersection of 65th & Park, and had finished paying for our meal when the lights in the restaurant went out - not a good sign.
We got in her car, not knowing of any problem, and took Park south, which turned out to be a big mistake - by 4:25 several area buildings had been evacuated and the street was completely jammed. We got to 50th & Park before stopping completely; Grand Central Station is at 43rd and Park and traffic was backed up the seven blocks in front of us because of all the people on the streets around Grand Central. The normal five lanes of the west side of Park Avenue turned into two at Grand Central and people were scattering wildly in front of cars adding to the mess.
Like most people we jumped off at a cross street and attempted to take Avenue of the Americas the remaining 70 blocks. We got on Avenue of the Americas from 49th St at 4:45 PM and by 5:45 PM (an hour) we had only gotten to 31st St - an average of 3 MPH. We continued on in this fashion; upon hitting Washington Square at about 8th St (7:50) everything really got bad - compounded by the fact that at the Holland Tunnel entrance, just a mile and a half south, nothing was moving and nobody could get by on either side.
We finally couldn't take it anymore and moved over to Broadway, which moved slightly faster. We got to my girlfriend's apartment at 8:40 PM local time, four hours and fifteen minutes after leaving the restaurant - power was already back in parts of the Upper West Side (west of Central Park) by then. Her apartment was without water for the reason Mayor Bloomberg described in his press conference - she lives on one of the high floors of her building and an electronic water valve had stopped working due to the blackout, causing her to be without any quantity of water. Upon realising this we decided to purchase some bottled water, which was hard to do because most shops closed long before 8:00 PM for fear of looting. We eventually found some at a nearby 24-hour supermarket and she went back up to her apartment at about 9:10 PM. I retrieved my rental car from her garage at 10:30 and was able to get home by 11 PM - a full eight hours and fifteen minutes after originally making the trip into the city via the Holland Tunnel.
...and now I'm here...
)
