City Museum in St. Louis is part cave, part circus, and 100% impossible to explain

It’s part art project, part circus, part cave

City Museum in downtown St. Louis is not the kind of place where you read placards and keep your hands to yourself.

It fills a former shoe warehouse with climbing structures, man-made caves, real circus acts, and a rooftop with a Ferris wheel and a school bus hanging off the edge.

Hundreds of thousands of people come through every year, and most of them leave looking like they’ve been crawling through something. That’s because they have.

From shoe chutes to a five-story slide

The building started as the International Shoe Company warehouse, and sculptor Bob Cassilly and his wife Gail bought it in 1993 with a different kind of footwear in mind. By 1997, they had opened the City Museum.

Cassilly and a crew of artists built almost everything from salvaged material pulled from around the city: old chimneys, steel bridges, airplane parts, and miles of tile.

The old spiral chutes that once moved shoes between floors gave them the idea for the slides, and they ran with it. More than 30 slides now run through the museum, including one that drops five full stories.

The caves are dim, and that’s the whole point

Deep inside the building, a network of man-made caves winds through the core of the museum. Tunnels pass sculptures of strange creatures.

You work your way up through tight passages, past the Spider Cave, and eventually reach a point where you can drop back down a multi-story slide. The lighting is low.

The passages are narrow.

It feels less like an art installation and more like actual exploring, which is exactly what Cassilly was going for.

Tunnels branch off giant trees and go everywhere

Three fake tree trunks rise up through the first, second, and third floors, and slides and tunnels branch off in every direction.

You can crawl through tight passages and pop out somewhere completely different than where you expected. A spider net waits on the upper floors, along with more treehouse territory.

Half the appeal is that you genuinely don’t know where a tunnel leads until you’re already in it. Kids disappear for 20 minutes and come out two floors away.

Two real jets you can climb inside, plus a giant slinky

Before you even get through the main doors, MonstroCity stops you in the parking area.

It’s a massive outdoor climbing structure that links castle turrets, bridges, a giant wrought-iron slinky, and a rocket ship. The centerpiece is two real Sabreliner 40 jet fuselages you can climb inside.

Kids scale the fuselages from the outside. Adults do too, though they’re less willing to admit it.

MonstroCity sets the tone for everything that follows, which is: nothing here is decorative.

A school bus nose-dives over the building’s edge

Take the stairs to the roof and the first thing you’ll see is a 1940 school bus tipped so its front end hangs out over the edge of the building.

A few feet away, a 3,000-pound praying mantis sculpture guards the corner. A working 1940 Big Eli Ferris wheel gives you some of the best elevated views in St. Louis.

Giant slides and fountains fill the rest of the space. The rooftop stays open most of the year, weather permitting, so check before you head up.

Circus Harmony performs in the ring on the third floor

The third floor holds a working circus ring where Circus Harmony performs live during museum hours. The group does aerial acts, juggling, and acrobatics.

Even when they’re not in a show, performers are often in the ring practicing, and you can watch. This isn’t a circus exhibit or a historical display.

Real people train here. If you time it right, you’ll catch a full performance.

If you don’t, you’ll probably still see someone doing something worth stopping for.

Axolotls, a doctor-fish tank, and a life-sized whale

The Artquarium mixes real tanks with sculptural sea creatures, and the crowd favorites are the pink axolotls. They’re amphibians that look like something between a salamander and a cartoon, and they draw a crowd.

If you’re brave, you can stick your hands into the doctor’s fish tank and let them go to work. There’s also a life-sized whale you can slide down through from the inside.

It’s exactly as strange as it sounds, and it works as both an art piece and a genuinely fun ride.

A 76-foot pencil stretches across the Skateless Park

At some point, City Museum acquired a 76-foot-long No. 2 pencil, built by artist Ashrita Furman, and it now stretches across the old Skateless Park area. The park itself has become a tangle of ramps and slides.

The pencil is just one of dozens of one-off objects scattered through the building.

Around almost every corner, you’ll find something that makes you stop and wonder how it got there, who put it there, and what the room used to be before it became this.

Collections that reward the adults who slow down

Not everything at City Museum is a climb. If you slow down between the slides, you’ll find some genuinely odd collections tucked into quieter corners.

One display gathers thousands of items recovered from inside old outhouses. Another holds taxidermy butterflies, moths, and insects.

The museum also holds one of the country’s largest collections of Louis Sullivan architectural pieces, the ornamental ironwork and terra cotta that defined 19th-century American buildings.

These are worth a long look if you can peel yourself away from the caves long enough.

A 1920 carousel and a new labyrinth opened recently

City Museum has never stopped changing, and that’s part of what keeps people coming back. In 2025, artists completed a maze-like installation called Labyrinth on the fourth floor.

An antique 1920 children’s carousel was added recently. New things are always going on somewhere, and something is always being rebuilt or expanded.

Regulars say they’ve come back four or five times and still found something they hadn’t seen before. That’s less a sales pitch and more just how this building works.

Wear shoes you can move in and bring your knee pads

Plan your visit to City Museum at 750 N. 16th St. in downtown St. Louis.

The museum opens several days a week, and hours shift by day and season, so check the official website before you go. Rooftop access usually runs as a small add-on to general admission.

Wear closed-toe shoes with grip and consider bringing knee pads because the caves and tunnels are hard on bare knees. Some attractions close for refurbishment from time to time, so confirm what’s open before your visit.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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