Newspaper Page Text
Page 5B
LifegG^O©
The Champion, Thursday, May 14 - 20, 2015
St. Louis' City Museum is a collection of the weird
by Andrew Cauthen
andrew@dekalbchamp. com
I t’s simply difficult to describe. It is part
playground, part museum and totally
weird.
The strangeness of City Museum in
St. Louis, Mo., is evident as one drives along
the street toward it: a tire truck appears to be
coming out of a third-story window; a school
bus is hanging off the roof; and an old plane is
precariously perched atop a steel structure.
Sections of chains with links the size of
a human are strewn in the patio leading to
the front door. A 10-story slide and various
midair walkways are outside, along with a fully
restored 1940, 30-foot-high Ferris wheel on the
roof.
Inside, the creativity of artist/sculptor
Bob Cassilly is equally on display. There is
the 76-plus foot, 21,500 pound No. 2 pencil
which contains two tons of graphite and has a
250-pound rubber eraser. A boiler expansion
tank with a pig face tills with water every 90
seconds and tips over, making it look like the
pig is vomiting. If you stand too close, you may
get wet.
Kids can slide and play at the indoor
skateless park, or climb through enchanted
caves. There’s a seven-story spiral slide, a ball
pit and a human-sized hamster wheel.
City Museum is the 600,000-square-foot
former home of the International Shoe Factory.
Cassilly, a St. Louis native, purchased the
museum in the early 1990s because “he always
wanted to do something different,” said C.J.
Couch, a floor staff manager at City Museum.
“He got real famous doing big sculptures
of animals, similar to that whale,” Couch
said, pointing to a life-size bowhead whale
that patrons were walking through. “He’s got
sculptures in our zoo, the Dallas Zoo. Actually
one of the tallest structures in the state of
Texas.. .is his giraffe...out in front of the Dallas
Zoo.” That statue is the tallest in Texas at 67.5
feet high.
Other works by Cassilly include Hippo
playground sculptures in Manhattan’s Riverside
Park; Hippopotamus Park statues at Central
Park’s Safari Playground in Manhattan and a
dinosaur at Dallas Planet Hollywood. Cassilly
died in a 2011 bulldozer accident while working
on another St. Louis creation, Cementland.
When Cassilly paid $1 million for the
building to create his museum/playground,
downtown St. Louis was a ghost town, Couch
said. “Nobody [was] putting money into
downtown St. Louis.”
Cassilly “cleaned up the building and
started sculpting this big whale here [and]
slowly the idea evolved into.. .a children’s
museum,” Couch said.
“He just always wanted to do something
beautiful and slowly piece by piece, [he
collected] recycled materials and architecture,
found items and big chains,” Couch said.
The items in the museum, according to its
website are the “very stuff of the city.” Cassilly
and his crew of 20 artisans reached “no farther
than municipal borders for its reclaimed
The Champion’s Andrew Cauthen struggles on the human-sized hamster wheel in St. Louis’ City Museum. Photo
by Deanna Cauthen
building materials:” chimneys, salvaged
bridges, construction cranes, tiles, glasses and
factory parts.
Other features in the museum include the
vault room, architectural museum, shoelace
factory, natural history museum, world
aquarium—the list goes on and on.
“And it still is a work in progress,” Couch
said.
In Cassilly’s own words, “City Museum
makes you want to know. The point is not
to learn every fact, but to say, ‘Wow, that’s
wonderful.’ And if it’s wonderful, it’s worth
preserving.”
For information on cost and hours, visit
www.citymuseum.org.
See page 12B for more pictures.
A pig-faced boiler expansion tank bolted to the back end
of an antique fire truck fills with water every 90 seconds
and tips, making it look like it’s puking. Photo by Andrew
Cauthen
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Visitors to City Museum can crawl through a series of wire tubes to reach one of two planes at the museum. Photo
by Andrew Cauthen