City Museum, St. Louis, MO — The Most Proudly Unsafe Museum EVER (19 Pics)

One of the most famous parts of the “museum.” From their website: “Reviving Wonderment. Expect the unexpected. City Museum is a hundred-year-old warehouse in downtown St. Louis in which artists have repurposed the pieces of old cities to build miles of tunnels, slides, climbers, bridges, and castles. There are secret passages and grand galleries. Playgrounds and ball pits. A circus and a train. A rooftop school bus and a Ferris wheel.”

Welded steel, slick metal, sharp corners and not a single bit of padding. No warning signs either. You’re expected (required!) to be diligent for your own safety! They tell you flat out, “Common sense prevails.” (If only it weren’t so uncommon these days....)

Good kneepads a must if you’re over 3 feet tall.

Crawling thru one of those metal tubes. At least six stories up. Piles of salvaged stones from a building facade and an old ship’s chain resting in the parking lot down below.

At 6 feet tall, I didn’t even try to climb thru some of the areas!

Rest of the museum in the background—an old reclaimed shoe factory. From their website (citymuseum.org): “Housed in the 10-story, 600,000 square-foot warehouse of the International Shoe Company, City Museum is a mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel made out of found and repurposed objects. The brainchild of internationally-acclaimed artist Bob Cassilly, a classically-trained sculptor, City Museum opened for visitors in 1997.”

All metal. Fantastic view. Not for agoraphobics though!

As wild as it is on the outside, it’s even more fantastic inside!

So, basically the whole thing about City Museum is that it’s just this abandoned shoe factory where this guy* stored a ton of salvaged materials collected when the old St. Louis industrial areas and other rust belt places began getting torn down and redeveloped. They used this stuff to build a “museum” by creatively reusing all these materials in whatever ways they could. These are the shoots that the boxes of newly-made shoes got sent down. Turned into (barely) human-sized slides now!!!

A creative welder’s dream ... an OSHA inspector’s nightmare....

Did I mention they have a FULL BAR!! ! (As if they didn’t already have me at “enter at your own risk”!!!)

TIL: The world’s largest pair of tighty-whities lives in Missouri. There. Now that’s a thing you know.

So, everywhere throughout the museum, things are made out of repurposed stuff. This is a close-up of a support column entirely covered in old 1950s-1960s newspaper print blocks! (I wanted to steal some of these SO BAD!!)

Each floor (I think there’s at least 10?) tends to have a different “theme” to it. This floor seemed carny inspired. With old midway attractions and other corny stuff. (More print blocks covering the walls here too!) (btw, this isn’t me—not a selfie!) From their website: “There are no maps of City Museum. And, if there were, they wouldn’t help for long. Things are always changing as the artists dream up new ways to draw you into their work. We are happy to highlight some of the most obvious installations, but there are dozens more hidden beneath the floors, behind the walls, and hanging just over your head. Let gravity be your friend: start at the top.”

The roof.

Random sign on a bench in an area specifically designed to be “toddler safe.” I love how it perfectly captures their genuine commitment to “do your own thing!”

Ok, so the basement is like several levels of concrete subterranean Shleestack City. I kept expecting to run into Marshal, Will and Holly (on the greatest expedition) and a rock table full of glowing pool balls, at any moment! Tunnels and holes of all shapes and sizes run everywhere. All barely lit (only visible here because I used flash for these pix) and some only just barely even accessible—or not, if you’re 6 feet tall, like me.

Where does this hole go? Who knows? Not me!