The Jinx of Big Allis
Going through some old photos the other day, I came across a shot I took of an imposing industrial structure in the Long Island City section of Queens. It’s known as the Ravenswood Generating Station and was built by electric utility Consolidated Edison in 1963. Several years later it was expanded with the addition of a mammoth unit from the Allis-Chalmers company. The unit was designed to be the world’s first million kilowat generating station, which the utility said was “big enough to serve 3,000,000 people.” The sheer enormity of the facility — the equivalent of 10 football fields — earned it the nickname “Big Allis.”
By the mid-1960s however it gained a different reputation, as the world’s most jinxed power plant. (This was decades before Chernobyl). Big Allis went on line in June of 1965. Five months later the Great Northeast Blackout ruined 14 of the generator’s 15 bearings which to stay lubricated needed pressurized oil from pumps that were powered by electricity that wasn’t there. But even before then it was clear something else was horribly wrong. Big Allis produced such pronounced vibrations that layers of insulation between vital metal parts were wearing away. By the summer of 1970 those vibrations had led to the disintegration of so much insulation that metal parts that should never have touched each other did, eventually shorting out the unit. So much heat was produced that the metal literally began melting. By January of 1971 and 80,000 man-hours of work later, Big Allis was declared repaired. To much fanfare the unit was gently restarted at 3% of its capacity. 87 minutes later it failed again. Critical parts burned out because of another spot of bad insulation. It was not retuned to service for another six months.
Big Allis has changed hands several times since it was constructed by ConEd in the 1960s and these days much of New York’s electricity comes from plants outside the city. Big Allis however still had one starring role left to play. In 1997 its smokestacks were a central part of the plot of a hit movie, “Conspiracy Theory” starring Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. Gibson played a New York cab driver who believed in wild government conspiracy theories and Julia Roberts was a Justice Department lawyer whose father, a judge, had been murdered. The film, which is available on Amazon Prime Video, helped popularize the belief that the U.S. government is controlled by a “deep state,” a theory that two decades later would help propel one national figure to a four-year stay in the White House.
