Walk into any dark room. The lights come on with the flip of a single switch. That's not a heart-stopping observation.

In the newly renovated spaces at the Historic District, the flip of a switch will start computers, printers, all types of office equipment and an almost infinite variety of electrical devices in the office, institutional and retail spaces that will soon occupy these buildings.

Nothing really new here. It's often been observed how dependent we have become upon electrical power and how much we take for granted what can happen with that flip of the switch.

All this really came home to me when I walked, climbed and crawled all through the American Tobacco Company's old power plant where steam powered turbines generated the factory's electrical needs. The accompanying photograph, only in a small way, reflects the intricacies of the control devices that were necessary for the generation of power.

It would be hard for me to imagine as many switches, valves and gauges contained in any other building of the same square footage. The point being, there were hundreds of switches and valves that had to be operated constantly, 24/7, so that all over the factory, the flip of a switch would power up machinery and light up work spaces.

The power plant was a factory in itself.

My excursion - in and around the boilers, the coal chutes and stokers, the giant concrete support columns on which the turbines were mounted and the maze of hundreds of valves and other controls - simply made me pause and think about all that is done by so many people and so much machinery so that the flip of a switch can make so much happen.

Those who occupy the power plant in the future, after all the boilers have been dismantled, are bound to have an appreciation for the powerful history of that building.

In one sense, it was the work of the power plant operators which created the opportunity for all the other work to take place on the American Tobacco campus.