Not too long ago, in 2003, New York City went dark.

Like much of the Northeastern United States, it had fallen victim to a massive blackout, and all 8 million residents of the biggest city in the country were among the estimated 45 million Americans who lost power is a mass, regional power outage.

While some areas saw their electricity restored within a few hours, most New Yorkers had to wait until the following morning before they regained power. Among those were the nearly 300,000 residents of New York’s 26th Ward, in Brooklyn.