Steam rises from the Barry & Sewall Chemical Company complex in Northeast Minneapolis, a facility known for producing adhesives, coatings, and specialty chemicals for over a century. Illuminated by floodlights and framed by dense pipe networks, the site reflects the city’s enduring industrial infrastructure along the rail and river corridors. The hand-painted logo on the wall remains a remnant of mid-20th-century branding still visible across many older manufacturing sites in the Twin Cities.

Inside an abandoned industrial building, a set of corroded water valves and pipes hangs overhead, marked with a fading yellow tag reading “City Water.” The scene captures the quiet afterlife of urban infrastructure—where once-busy mechanical systems now sit dormant beneath exposed rafters and dim fluorescent tubes. These remaining fixtures, wrapped in aging insulation and patched tape, reveal the skeletal logic of a space once dependent on pressurized networks, maintenance routines, and municipal supply lines that connected the factory to the city’s hidden circulatory systems.