All the errands had been run, no provisions were needed, and plenty of life support was on hand (coffee), so I wandered... and ended up at the Saint Paul water tower.
I'm a transplant to Minnesota with no idea what the deal was with this structure, so in looking it up I found out about this cool site https://www.mnopedia.org/
While very interesting, as predicted, the actual history did not measure to my imagined history.