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Downtown St. Louis, Missouri, has plenty of recognizable landmarks, but one of its most memorable attractions used to churn out shoes. Before City Museum became a unique attraction where visitors can crawl through tunnels, scramble across suspended structures, disappear into caves, and slide between floors, it was the former International Shoe Company situated on North 16th Street. The building’s industrial past has become part of the City Museum experience today, with traces of its backstory mixed into an enormous work of interactive art and installations.
Sculptors Bob and Gail Cassilly were initially the creative force behind this not-so-conventional museum. Working with a group of like-minded artists, the pair gave new life to the former shoe factory using discarded industrial materials, such as concrete, rebar, plaster, and iron. The museum first opened in the 1990s and has been evolving and expanding with new, innovative spaces and installations ever since. One of its latest additions is the rotation gear from the Millennium Hotel’s rotating rooftop restaurant, which was donated to the museum after the hotel was demolished. While the museum hasn’t yet revealed how the gear will be used, the creative staff behind the scenes are sure to come up with something unique and unexpected…