When our daughters were small, we would wake them before dawn on Thanksgiving morning and drive into Manhattan to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from a spot on Central Park West, just across the street from The Dakota (the apartment building where John Lennon lived and died). I didn’t know then that I would someday be inside that building and looking at the heating system that had served tenants since 1884, but that’s how it worked out. Life’s funny that way.
The Dakota once had a steam engine in its basement. They made electricity with that engine and used the waste steam to heat the radiators. As other buildings arrived in the neighborhood, The Dakota became a co-gen plant for them. I stood in the footprint of that long-gone steam engine and felt very thankful for the experience.