There was some looting during the blackout that started Thursday afternoon and lasted for more than a day in some corners of New York City. While there were fewer arrests overall in that period than the average summer day — 850 as opposed to 950, the police told the Associated Press — it can be assumed that city police had their hands full. The police told the AP that some 250 of their arrests that day were directly related to the power outage. And scattered reports of burglaries trickle out. The New York Times reports on a break-in at Zodiac Jewelry in the Bronx. When that establishment’s alarm system was disabled by the outage, the paper reports, burglars made off with about $100,000 worth of chains, rings, bracelets, and whatever else was on hand. The New York Post reports on a young man who died after falling from a roof during the looting of a Foot Locker in Brooklyn.

Still, the echoes of the blackout of 1977 could hardly be heard during the blackout of 2003. In the July 13, 1977 blackout, more than 3,400 people were arrested and 558 police officers were injured trying to restore order. Property damage estimates were around $150 million.

What changed between 1977 and 2003? To New York historian Fred Siegel, a professor at Cooper Union, the answer is “blindingly transparent.””A sense of civil order has been restored in the interim,” Mr. Siegel told The New York Sun yesterday. Whereas lawlessness had come to rule the day by 1977 — as opposed to 1965, when a similar blackout came to be remembered as downright romantic — law and order have been restored to the New York City of 2003. Some have attributed the calm on Thursday and Friday to a new civic mindedness since September 11, 2001. There’s something to that. New Yorkers walking across the Brooklyn Bridge at rush hour Thursday could be heard chattering about the possibility that a terrorist attack had occurred, and people seemed to stay calm not in spite of, but because of, this fear. Still, too much can be made of this point.

New York had been transformed before the destruction of the World Trade Center. It was Mayor Giuliani — before the attacks — who proved that New York was not ungovernable. Combining an assault on quality-of-life offenses with the institution of the Compstat computer system, which helped track outbreaks of crime and allowed police to head them off, Mr. Giuliani reestablished a civic life in Gotham. And, as Mr. Siegel has pointed out, the mayor was obsessed with emergency preparedness at a time when much of the rest of the nation was on a vacation from history. Mr. Giuliani did not forget about the February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, making it a centerpiece of his 1994 inaugural address. He went on to create the Office of Emergency Management, designed to coordinate the city’s response to catastrophic events. As Mr. Siegel noted recently in The Weekly Standard, when Mr. Giuliani set up an emergency command center, it was derided as overkill. The New York Times called it Rudy’s “bunker,” and Mayor Koch called the idea “nuts.” “He was mocked for that at the time, but clearly we’re benefiting from it now,” Mr. Siegel said yesterday. It was OEM that coordinated the city’s smooth response during the blackout, flooding the streets with blue and drowning disorder.

There are parallels between the New York of 1977 and the New York of 2003. As New York is now trying to climb out of a fiscal crisis, so the city was doing in 1977. Demographically, Mr. Siegel points out that one key indicator, the number of male children of single-parent families, is about the same today as it was then. But there are differences, too. New York still feels like it is in an upswing. Whereas during the 1977 blackout many in the Bronx set fire to their own properties, because they could get more through insurance than through the market, no such calculations seem to be in play now. Also, people have a greater sense of ownership in their communities. Mr. Siegel points to Mr. Giuliani’s promotion of home ownership. No one, we suspect, would have expected a repeat of 1977 Thursday if asked how New York would deal with such a crisis. And, in large part, that’s why there wasn’t a repeat. It is people’s expectations that guide their behavior. With most New Yorkers expecting order, rather than panic, they remained orderly. What a sea change.