Before I submit an IMDb Goof for the movie “tick, tick … BOOM!” I wanted to check on how utilities shut-off for non-payment worked in NYC around 1990.
It’s not a significant spoiler to say that at one point in the film, a character’s power gets shut off due to the bill not having been paid. When the electricity is shut off, the gas stove also goes off, extinguishing an active gas burner. I’ve lived places where the gas and electricity were operated by the same utility and billed on one statement and places where they are billed separately, and the former always seemed to me to be unusual and a little backward (probably because it was where I grew up). But I thought I would check with the Teeming Millions to see what the status was 30-ish years ago in the Big Apple. If you didn’t pay your electric bill, would it result in getting both your electric and gas shut off?
I suppose it depends on how one gets the heat/electricity, but it wouldn’t be uncommon to get both through Con Edison (I do myself to this day) - I’d go so far as to say it is standard. (For homeowners, anyway - in my years as a NYC apartment renter, the heat was often included in the rent as the entire building was heated with a common boiler, but electricity was metered by apartment.)
The Con Ed bills show separate tallies for gas and electric charges, but payment is done with a single check to cover both utilities for the same billing cycle (even now, with electronic payment, it’s a single monthly payment to Con Edison). And so if you failed to write a check one month, that’d put you behind on both utilities.
In theory you could write a check specifically to pay the one utility and not the other, but you’d really have to go out of your way to do that.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s standard - Con Ed provides electric service to almost all of NYC, but only provides gas to Manhattan, the Bronx and part of Queens. ( The rest of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island get gas from National Grid ) But it’s definitely not uncommon.
Fair enough. All my gas+electric combined bills were incurred in Manhattan and NE Queens
FWIW, when I lived in Brooklyn it was in an apartment where the heat was included and I only had to pay a Con Ed electric bill; however one time I had a potential gas leak in my kitchen, and was told to call Brooklyn Union Gas (of which National Grid is evidently the successor).
