Actually here on the Upper West Side we got power back at 6 am Friday, 14 hours after it went out. But it took a while for big electronic things that were shut down to come back up. For example, cable TV service didn't get restored until 8pm, Panix, my ISP, just came up an hour and a half ago (1 am Saturday), and the subways still don't work.
They said it would take 6-8 hrs to restore the subways after the power was restored, and that's seems to be basically the story with everything: everything is taking 4 or 5 times as long as people thought due to lots of pain in the ass problems they hadn't forseen on top of the ones they had. My impression is this goes for the grid as well. It seems like nothing was damaged, just like they initially thought, because everything shut down proactively. Con Ed told Bloomberg, and he announced in his endlessly re-broadcast press conference, that this meant it would take about 3 hours to get it going again due to the "complicated choreography" that turning on power grids entailed. But no one had ever actually done it before on this scale with exactly this system and, well, it takes longer.
Michael