Remains of the Spray

Most of the windows are broken. Grids of fractured panes run in rows that delineate each floor of the plain, squarish factory when viewed from the riverbank below. Yet it's easy to overlook such disrepair, because this edifice abuts a more dramatic ruin, gutted by fire nearly a decade ago. Passersby, naturally drawn to the catastrophic, stop to gape at those gutted walls, lapped by flames that could be seen from miles away. The less apocalyptic factory gets little notice. It's the architectural equivalent of a man with a Band-Aid on his knee sitting next to someone in a body cast.

But the interior of this fenced-off building, just off Washington and Park Avenues in downtown Minneapolis, is the urban equivalent of the cave paintings at Lascaux. In the late afternoon sunlight, the walls leap with color: vivid greens, reds, blues, and the occasional maxim written in black aerosol: You cannot sedate all the things you hate, or Know Self. This building has become an art installation eight floors high, curated by generations of graffiti artists who wriggled in illegally through broken windows or climbed up tenuously attached fire-escape ladders. They've left their empty canisters on the floor, their work on the walls. Yet, as one span of intact windowpanes predicts, The End Is Near; the words are, coincidentally enough, spelled out in the same shade of yellow paint as the construction crane that perches over the top of the roof.

The crane augurs change: urban renewal that will not accommodate spray cans or street slogans. It will transform this building into high-buck condominiums, shiny panes of double-glaze taking the place of shattered safety glass; tasteful wall coverings replacing the work now signed by Squid, Ether, Nimph, and their legion.

Eight decades ago, long before the building became a makeshift gallery, these honeycombed windows would have revealed a hive of faceless laborers who worked side by side to bring Minneapolis to the top of the flour-milling industry. After the factory shut its doors in the 1960s, equally faceless successors crawled in with their aerosol cans, sized up this outmoded temple of American business, and called it their own.

Part of the historic Washburn "A" mill complex, this brick structure is known as the utility building. It rose from the banks in 1914 during the clicking, clacking industrialization of American agriculture. This factory was among the first to employ an invention called the middlings purifier, which blew wheat husks out of the flour. The resulting pure, white wares claimed top honors in an industry competition, an achievement heralded in the giant metal letters--Gold Medal Flour--that still tower over the utility building from the top of the mill next door.

After the milling complex closed down, people who saw the place sensed the allure, felt what mill historian David Wiggins calls "the spirit to the place," a kind of psychogeographical aura he attributes to the "dramatic changes associated with this point on the map." During the subsequent decades, urban daredevils roamed the site playing heady games of hide-and-seek, where "going for the Gold"--standing on top of the G--was the risk-taker's highest honor. Among the lore of the place is the tale of a nameless man who, through his camera lens, fell in love with this cluster of buildings and took hundreds of photos of them before committing suicide.

Standing inside the utility building, you can easily understand his obsession. This building yields an emotional effect that no glossy design journal can conjure. Heavy relics of industrialization--solid iron outcroppings, metal doors, and oversized power switches--are lightened by free-flowing streams of paint. Nearby, tailgating Metrodome fans honk their horns, sending an echo through the dusty space. But the rooms are still restful, like an artist's studio. A breeze curls through the chamber, setting a spray can into a brisk roll. Squint hard and the can becomes a metal roller in full motion, grinding wheat in an ever-finer succession of rollers and sifters--part of a process that required 19 milling steps and 180 separations before the finished product was deposited in bins for packing into bags and barrels. The utility building was where the packaging took place, and on the first floor, a framework of bins still stands, not far from a heavy sliding door covered with black graffiti tags.

Most of the floors are wide open; others have small rooms at one end that were once offices and test kitchens--predecessors of the Betty Crocker kitchens. One open floor was a cafeteria, a sign of enlightened management, who also brought in a player piano--"early Muzak," as Wiggins calls it. This was meant to provide a cheery environment for the floor known as "No Man's Land" because only women worked there, packaging flour.