120. CITY MUSEUM

St. Louis, Missouri

7/20/2012

This place is weird. Very weird. But fun. Very fun.

Several years ago some guy started the City Museum as sort of an art exhibit / amusement park out of demolished buildings and junk. It’s grown into a very odd place. There are these little rooms where kids can run through tunnels and then look down and see marine animals swimming about below them.

Meanwhile, there are museum cases with frontier-era pottery, bug collections, and taxidermy animals.

There’s a one-ring circus inside. Some of the performers were practicing acrobatics and juggling when we got there. Daniel and Philip started at them for a while and then starting tumbling around on the floor. Pretty funny.

There’s a miniature working train that the boys got to ride on. We thought they’d be scared, but they loved it. It was run by a dwarf.

There was an older guy working around the train place who kept making corny jokes at all the other employees as they walked by. It was clear they hated his guts.

The best part of the “museum” was an outdoor area where people could climb up all this junk and then slide down slides. It was bizarrely fun, especially since the whole place is supposed to look like it’s made out of trash – which it is. Daniel loved jumping in the giant ball pit.

Philip wanted to live more dangerously. He and I climbed to the top and then slid down a giant slide. I thought it was pretty scary, but he didn’t!

It’s really hard to describe this place. There’s so much randomness – at some places it’s a serious museum, at others it’s a sideshow sort of thing, in others it’s a kid’s play area. This was a good thing and a bad thing. I think it would depend on your mood. The City Museum tries to be so many things at once it can be kind of overwhelming, especially with a bunch of kids in tow. (Apparently, the designer’s original intention was for adults to be his primary audience: this showed, since in the tight maze-like “kid” area I lost Daniel for a while. Pretty scary.) On the other hand, that’s the entire charm. As this place grows, there seems to be no limit as to what can happen here. No doubt, there’s nowhere else on earth quite like this.

Now, Missouri, we bid you well. As we left St. Louis the boys waved goodbye to the Mississippi River one last time.