Eulogy

The port had no future when I found it. Barges stopped running years earlier when construction of a lock and dam rendered the waterway north of downtown Minneapolis commercially useless. The northernmost port on the Mississippi was shut down and left to rust along its banks.

As redevelopment swept through the city, the Port of Minneapolis managed to dodge the ‘exposed brick’ indignity that befell its renovated contemporaries. It was one of the last artifacts of heavy industry still standing, a hulking monument of Detroitus between the highway and the river on the city’s neglected northside. For decades, it proved to be more trouble than it was worth to developers. Until it wasn’t. Which, naturally, was right about the time I found my way there in the spring of 2014.

Winter was finally relenting. I sliced a pair of well-worn jeans into something more seasonal and headed downtown on my bike, eager to remember the sun and take in the energy as the streets came alive. The crowded grid felt viscous after months of floating across frozen streets alone. I quickly strayed from the reawakened chaos and followed the river north away from the vibration. I turned onto streets with names I didn’t recognize, without a destination in mind. Condos and restaurants faded into blocks lined with scrapyards and unmarked warehouses–a detour from deterministic progress into sideshadows I didn’t know existed. In years of exploring the city, I had never heard of this area, let alone come here. It was a limb of Minneapolis that was cut off when the interstate was built in the 1950s and left to atrophy. Signs were still visible on buildings— “Acrylic Fabricators”, “Linen Supply Co” —but the original occupants were long gone. Windows were boarded up and any business being done was the sort best avoided. I continued on, climbing a hill above the area. As I looked out, my eyes were immediately drawn to a cluster of structures that stood almost alien on the horizon.

My bike chattered over dormant railroad tracks, cracking open the silence with the sound of gravel under tires. A less than discrete entrance to a place that clearly wasn’t expecting visitors. I froze up as a plastic bag softly ghosted across the crumbling pavement. My mind raced between barely oxygenated breaths.

Caaalm down.
There’s no one here.
Probably.
What the hell was that?
Get out, get out, get out…

After a few minutes with an eye toward the exit, it was clear I was alone. Exhaling, my surroundings came into clearer focus. Graffiti splashed across patinaed metal and eroding concrete. Plant life sprung from imperceptible cracks in the hard surfaces, a quiet reminder of nature’s contentment to wait out the blip of human ambition. It all blended into something that felt strangely like remembering. My initial fears thawed into waves of nostalgia for a place and past I didn’t know. 

I wandered through towering domes and conveyors that reached into forgotten imagination. The paint on its structures peeled back like cracked skin, its rusted steel beams groaning like old bones in the wind off the river. Used up, but not gone. I stopped by the edge of the water to look out at a sliver of an island that herons transformed into a Seussian rookery. Nests clung to every branch that could bear the weight of the feathered dinosaurs. A bead of sweat slid into my mouth, the taste of salt immediately pulling me into my self. The same alertness that kept me clear of cars and potholes left me awash in vivid bursts of sensory minutiae: my shirt wet and cool against the heaves of my chest, my pulse echoing in the back of my head. Brain dissolving into body.

Each time I crossed over the tracks that separated the port from realtime, I returned to a psychogeography where existing felt easier. Time grew more spacious, stretching sideways into the slower rhythm of memories and dreams. Space opened up for feelings to come to stay, not pass. Swaying on an improvised tire swing and climbing the beams into its canopy, I felt the texture of the world more deeply and began to reconnect with the raw materials of my life. 

The port became both an escape from and grounding in Minneapolis. A material escape from the monotony of sterilized space designed for consumption, and a psychological escape from an overmediated existence designed for performers and spectators, but never humans. And all the while, it grounded me with a tangible sense of historical place that I’d only fantasized about through old photos and my grandpa’s stories. Like cracking into amber, the imagined city made real.  

I had the port to myself each time I went that first summer. As fall arrived and the cold clawed its way in, I was surprised to find an old woman there watching the last of the herons head south. We chatted for a few minutes, but something felt off. The strangeness of interaction in a place of solitude, I figured. My toes and fingers needled as blood retreated from the chill. It was time to move. I wished her well and turned to leave as she stared out at the giant birds. “They’re going to tear it down,” she murmured. I choked on her words, my eyes blurring. I took in little else of what was said. This place that seemed like it would go on forever had finally fallen into the crosshairs of capital. It was the way of the world, even if being there felt like existing outside of it.

There wasn’t going to be a petition to save a place no one knew about, so I resolved to build up my own structures of residual meaning before it was gone. Visiting became my ritual through the seasons. I stayed just long enough to remember during the winter and submerged myself in summer time that felt slow and smooth like looking up from the bottom of a pool, the world warping into something less punishing in refracted light. 

Years went by and still the port remained. It turned out that the place that drew me in with the way it could slow the sands of time was in no rush to go. The city’s plans for redevelopment stalled for more than eight years, and I never stopped savoring the extra time. It wasn’t until the fall of 2022 that the port finally went away.

I went back for a final time over the winter. I stood in a familiar spot with snow up to my knees, taking in the empty expanse along the river. Memory flooded through the swirling gray sky hanging where the decaying structures had stood. My chest tightened as I squinted at the cold white sheet covering the scattered ruins below. Some dignity in the harshness. The wind whipped, pulling a hot tear from my cheek and sending me away.

Dedicated to my grandpa, whose stories about Minneapolis in the 40s sparked a curiosity I hope to never stop chasing.