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City Museum is a playhouse museum, consisting largely of repurposed architectural and industrial objects, housed in the former International Shoe building in the Washington Avenue Loft District of St. Louis, Missouri. It opened in 1997 and entry costs $12 plus tax for ages 3 years and up. There is also parking fees depending upon where you park. The museum is generally open 7 days a week. MonstroCity is open weather permitting.
The City Museum has been named one of the "great public spaces" by the Project for Public Spaces, and has won other local and international awards as a must-see destination. It has been described as "a wild, singular vision of an oddball artistic mind" and compared to the similarly individualistic Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. It is 600,000 square feet of crazy fun for young people.
It would be easy for very young children to get separated from parents, so a parent or older sibling capable of crawling and climbing with the children is a good idea. |
The rooftop and outside playground at City Museum |
Located in front of the building, MonstroCity features two Sabreliner 40 aircraft fuselages suspended high in the air, a fire engine, a castle turret, a 25-foot cupola, four-foot-wide Slinkies that can be crawled through, one very high that leads to a slide, and two ball pits, one for young children and one for older ones, each pit being filled with large, rubber dodge balls. |
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 City Museum was founded by artist Bob Cassilly and his then-wife Gail Cassilly. The museum's building was once an International Shoe Company factory and warehouse but was mostly vacant when the Cassillys bought it in 1983. Construction began in January 1995.
The City Museum opened to the public on October 25, 1997. Within two years, it was drawing 300,000 visitors a year.
The museum has since expanded, adding new exhibits such as MonstroCity in 2002, Enchanted Caves and Shoe Shaft in 2003, and World Aquarium in 2004.
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Cassilly remained the museum's artistic director until his death in 2011. |
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The original part of the museum, the first floor is home to a life-size Bowhead Whale that guests can walk through |
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Slippery eel spewing water |
One of many crawl spaces for children |
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Big boys crawling though tight spaces, while their wives and the two RV Gypsies laughed at them. |
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Below: More crawl spaces |
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Spiral staircases |
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Winding staircases everywhere |
A giant slinky to crawl through |
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On the second floor, The Vault Room contains two 3,000-pound vault doors built in mid-19th-century St. Louis and installed in a bank in Chicago, Illinois. The room also has a marble bar and about 1,000 safety deposit boxes. |
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Below: Cool photos of the two RV Gypsies inside the vault |
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More spiral staircases and an aquarium |
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decorated walls |
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Lee Duquette painting sparkles on the cardboard castle. Yes, it was allowed. |
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There is also the Everyday Circus, a circus school with students from 6 to 80+.The Everyday Circus performs daily at the museum and does private parties. On this date, the two RV Gypsies watched performances by school children from Germany. |
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Karen Duquette had fun sitting in the spinning chairs. |
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Below: Outside fun |
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Below: The Robot display |
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There is a lot of cool stuff and places inside City Museum that the two RV Gypsies did not photograph, and many that the two RV Gypsies did not get to see. This is a very large place. |
