Where the Wild Things Would Go On a Field Trip

St. Louis, MO - Friday, May 31, 2013

When we told our travel plans to a friend at a party several months ago, a gal we'd met recently was excited on our behalf. “If you go to St. Louis,” she enthused. “You HAVE to go to the City Museum!”

A city museum. That doesn't sound very good, but keep going.

It was created, she told us, by late Missourian sculptor Bob Cassilly, a visionary who died tragically in a bulldozer accident in 2011 while constructing an art park entitled “Cementland.” His greatest creation, City Museum is housed in (and on top of) a ten story abandoned shoe factory, and lists among its memorable features a full sized school bus hanging off of the roof. That you can walk in. And look down from.

You had my interest, now you've got my attention.

It is called “City Museum” because it is made of the city's spare parts, carefully pieced together into statues and mosaics, pools and fountains, ladders and slides, and displays of the weird and wonderful.

“If you see nothing else in St. Louis, go to the City Museum,” she concluded.

So we do.

And let me tell you.

Words cannot do it justice.

Think of all the metal playgrounds that got replaced by plastic because someone might get hurt. The monster trees you climbed when you were ten and now look at with retroactive fear for your life. The forts you built out of chairs, tables, blankets or branches.

The City Museum is a shrine to them.

Its labyrinthine sprawl of art is the closest thing we've felt to living the film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. There is not a room that doesn't have more than one secret passage: leading into the ceiling to a different level, or running under the floors or behind the walls to hidden areas that can only be glimpsed through grates or bars, or not at all.

We climb, crawl, slide, hide, jump, swing, sprint, and spin.

We explore.

And we leave as acolytes of the message that was offered to us: If you see nothing else in St. Louis, go to the City Museum.