Illustration by Mike Hirshon
Bob Cassilly worked with junk and hired misfits; did everything to guarantee economic failure and made money instead. He was labeled an overgrown kid without social skills, yet he jump-started two wrecked neighborhoods and turned a rotting warehouse into what’s been ranked one of the greatest public spaces in the world. He set out to please only himself, and he managed to delight more than 600,000 people every year.
How did he pull it off? One answer’s up in the sunlit air, as he slung a leg across his 24-foot, 3,000-pound praying mantis and rode her, without safety ropes or harness, to the top of City Museum. Another’s deep below the earth, in the caves born of his earliest memories. And a third is out on the sharp edge of experience, where he pushed himself and everybody around him daily.
To say Bob Cassilly knew he was wanted would be an understatement. Judy Cassilly told her firstborn more than once, “The day I felt you move for the first time was the happiest moment of my life.” Play came easily to him: He figured out the workings of older kids’ toys, hung vines so he could swing across his backyard creek, dug a cave out of its banks. He was sweet, his mother says, “but a difficult child to raise, because he was so shy.” She gave gentle pushes and continual encouragement, and for eighth grade, she sent him to the Marianists at Chaminade College Preparatory School, “because he needed more attention.”
What really worked, though, was getting him apprenticed to Rudy Torrini, a sculptor with the same wildly prolific energy. Bob swept the floor in Torrini’s studio, kept silent, and watched. Soon he was coming every day after school and all day Saturday—a pattern that lasted through high school. He was so determined to continue studying with Torrini, he forsook a Fulbright grant and became Fontbonne College’s first male graduate.
“He’d be working on 10 or 20 projects a semester,” recalls classmate Kurt Knickmeyer (who spent the next three decades as his assistant). “I had an aesthetics class with him, and all of a sudden I was listening to a side of Bob I’d never heard before. He was incredibly articulate, poring over all that philosophy and just sucking it in.”
Also in that class were Cecilia Davidson, a lighthearted artist with whom Bob had fallen in love, and Gail Soliwoda, a Missionary Sister of Our Lady of Africa.
“I thought he was just this arrogant guy,” Gail remembers, “and he thought I was this misguided young woman.”
He married Davidson right after graduation, in the spring of 1972. They honeymooned in Rome, where Bob managed to wrestle a crazed, hammer-wielding saboteur to the ground and save Michelangelo’s Pietà. Returning in a flurry of publicity he loathed, they moved into Lafayette Square, then in ruins. They bought a house at the corner of Hickory and 18th streets and used their fireplace to heat it.
A community of friends began to form—including J. Walter Scott, who, inspired by Bob, bought a house on his MasterCard. They shared a studio for a time, and garrulous Scott learned to work without speaking while Bob blasted classical music (he liked its complexity) and chiseled away. When Bob and Cece decided to open Park Place Restaurant, Scott helped Bob salvage a marble reception desk from the old Hotel Claridge to use as a bar. The wrecking ball was poised to swing as they tore through the rooms, prying off medicine cabinets whose beveled-glass mirrors, framed with molding, would become a wall behind the bar.
Once the restaurant was up and running, it was less fun, so Bob and Cece flew to Maui to live on the beach. They returned from their idyll a year later (Bob was bored), and soon after, they divorced. By then, Bob was working on a master of fine arts degree at Fontbonne, where Soliwoda—who’d left the convent—was teaching sculpture. Bob exerted all his charm.
They married in 1982 and started a fiberglass fabrication company, Cast Stone, in their basement. The chemicals reeked; neighbor Alice Sherwood once opened the door to find Bob awkwardly clutching a dolphin column in token apology. “He was kind of a standoffish guy,” she says, “a little socially inept, yet very sweet. He’d always jump to help somebody if they had a bike stolen out of their yard or something.” There was a lot of theft in the early days—her hammock, John and Alison Ferring’s barbecue pit… Cassilly would drop his art to give chase, but he and Gail also started hiring kids from the neighboring projects to do odd (no doubt truly odd) jobs. Lafayette Square started to stabilize.
By now, Bob was making what Gail called his “critters.” There was a praying mantis to sit atop his studio and a griffin for his alma mater, St. John Vianney High School, and there were dragons on playgrounds, Romanesque owls on town houses, baboons in bas relief on an office building. No project was big enough to satisfy his imagination, though. “Sometimes he was just sort of aimless,” his friend Thomas Danisi remembers. “He’d say, ‘I’m not feeling well today. I’m just going to be alone.’”
“The worst of Bob’s moods were in the late ’80s,” Knickmeyer says. “Then we started doing more of the big stuff for the Saint Louis Zoo.” He did a 28-foot great white shark, a 50-foot giant squid, a pterodactyl that had to be taken apart to get it through the doors. This was more like it! He created Hippo Playground in Manhattan; Turtle Park in St. Louis; a 67.5-foot giraffe for the Dallas Zoo (lengthening its tongue to clinch its record as the tallest sculpture in Texas).
“He was completely jazzed,” Danisi recalls. The fascination with making things bigger and bigger “was just part of the contour of his thinking. He used to make these gestures with his hands, hold them far apart, like a beach ball, and kind of mold the air.”
In the summer of 1993, Danisi walked into the Cassillys’ house and found Scott imploring Bob, “Don’t do it! Just don’t do it!” Gail was in Wimbledon mode, watching the conversation slam back and forth. “You’re not going to believe this,” she told Danisi under her breath, “but somebody offered us a lot of money for the Polar Wave Ice building, and Bob wants to take the money and buy two buildings downtown.”
Two really big buildings.
Danisi looked back at Scott, who by now was on his knees. “He’s saying, ‘Bob, please! All the pipes have burst!’ and Bob is just, like, dreaming,” Danisi recalls. “He’s not even looking at Walter Scott, even though Walter Scott is praying to him. Obstacles were not obstacles to Bob. They were means to an end.”
He talked Washington University into a selling price of 69 cents a square foot (a fifth of the original asking price) for the sumptuous (well, once sumptuous; now so moist, mushrooms grew between the floorboards) International Shoe building and warehouse, 762,000 square feet, all told. “You couldn’t argue with the economics of it,” Gail says. Theodore Link’s elegant facade alone was worth the price. But then she and Bob went rollerblading through the warehouse, careening around pillars. When they finally glided to a stop, she said breathlessly, “God, it was worth buying it just for this!”
Tim Tucker, another Lafayette Square neighbor who scavenged old beauty, had already been hired by the Cassillys to run their company. “The day we closed, we went down and got probably 80 keys,” he says. “Bob and I climbed up to the roof, sat on top of the water towers, looked at each other and said, ‘What do we do next?’”
First, Bob took the bars off the windows, ignoring all the cries of “You can’t do that! People will break in!” Then, Tucker says, they stripped reflective film off the windows “so light could come in, and the building started to breathe. We picked up trash, painted other people’s buildings, and planted trees everywhere, just dug holes in the sidewalk with concrete saws.” The city required a fence; instead of the usual chain-link, Bob cast a hollow serpent with 1,752 wrought-iron spikes through its undulating body. “Whenever I look at the smile on that snake, I think of Bob,” Tucker says. “His eyes would narrow and twinkle, and his lips would purse, and you knew he was up to fun.”
They lined the space with artists’ studios and used the rent money to keep working, but they had no specific plans, just random ideas for what they’d dubbed “The Museum of Things That Could Kill You.” One day Sen. Jack Danforth, whose foundation was eager to develop Washington Avenue, came over for a tour just as Bill Christman was hanging his corn-dog museum. “You could hear
him laughing from one end of the floor to the other—and it’s an acre and a half,” Tucker says. “The Danforth Foundation gave us a $250,000 grant for operating expenses.”
Taking the cash meant registering as a nonprofit children’s museum. Bob begged Gail—master of details, smoothing, and closure—to be the director. She sighed and agreed.
Bob built a 40-foot whale. He made a stream with Dakota Mahogany granite from the old Southtown Famous-Barr. He and Tucker lifted away the City Hospital steps right before the city changed its mind. Artists and collectors and circus performers joined in the game, and City Museum came to life, boggling visitors’ minds with curiosities and relics and fantasy and cornball fun.
Alas, a nonprofit children’s museum has a circus’s worth of hoops to jump through, not to mention red tape, liability, and a habit of poverty. Bob didn’t like feeling constrained. He used to greet his insurance agent from The Daniel and Henry Co. by jumping over the stair railing and landing, hard, on the marble floor below. He loathed the board meetings and the begging (a.k.a. fundraising). Money drained away, pressure built, and finally…Gail opened a toaster exhibit. He hated that toaster exhibit. He wanted boy stuff, dares and scary obstacles, not crafts, domestic artifacts, and teachable moments.
And so there came, in his playful kingdom, a great war. It started in 1999, and it lasted for three years, during which he was banned from power and started creating what then-manager Matt Philpott called “Anti City Museum” in the shoe shaft and on the roof. “He literally was going to build another world all around City Museum and take away all its visitors,” says Philpott. He laid siege, actually staging a sleep-in at one point, and when it was all over, the board had melted like a wet wicked witch, the museum was for-profit, he was running it, and Gail was gone—from the museum and from their marriage.
It would be more than mildly amusing to read a Harvard Business School case study of Cassilly’s management style. No computers—he preferred handwriting. No brochures with stunning photographs—he wanted people to see stuff for themselves. No signs—when Sam Bauer had a brass “Samwich” board designed for his café, Bob threw it down the steps because it was too “mall.” For years he banned even directional signs, saying they discouraged exploration.
“He hated office staff, thought it was a waste,” says George Diehl, a carpenter from Lafayette Square who worked for Bob for more than 30 years. “When the museum opened, there were just miles of offices, and over the years he kept whittling them away.”
Mike DeFilippo, City Museum’s photographer in residence (literally—he lives in the lofts) points out that “when everybody else was watching TV, playing golf, or surfing the Internet, Bob was thinking and creating and building. He didn’t waste time in committee meetings. He got shit done.”
Employees fought to keep up. “He’d walk in with his jaw set: ‘What’s everybody do-ing? Everybody in this building is goofing off!’” Diehl says. His temper could make him erratic: He’d hire a guy who’d held the door for him, but at the slightest hint of disloyalty turn on a longtime staffer. “‘Tell him he’s fired,’ he’d say, without even blinking,” Diehl recalls. “He fired his brother.”
Bob was a tyrant, a Svengali, a mentor. “He was like a drug,” Knickmeyer says. “You just couldn’t get enough of being around him.” City Museum director Rick Erwin has never taken the elevator, because Bob never did; he tucks in his shirt, because Bob always did. He tried so hard to please Bob that Bob rebuked him for it. “He told me that was my downfall: I was trying to think like him and second-guessing myself,” Erwin says wryly. “He said, ‘Do it the way you’d do it. I like some of the stuff you do.’”
Bob certainly never second-guessed himself. “I remember telling him about someone who didn’t like us, and he said, ‘Why do you care?’” Erwin says. “He always did what he wanted to do”—except when he got coerced into a media interview. After a session with a New York Times reporter, he told then–deputy director Jean Larson Steck, “I think I did good! I think I did good!” She said, “Bob, your polo shirt is on inside out.”
City Museum’s mosaic artist waited months for Bob to indicate a floor design. One day someone looked down from the mezzanine and saw Bob moving fast, his body half bent as he slashed in great swoops with a grease pencil: Here was an eye. Here, a fin. An onlooker caught her breath as a mermaid took shape. Soon he’d covered the entire floor.
He worked at lightning speed, but he also spent a lot of time staring, wondering, sitting chin in hand and watching children react. “As soon as something gave him a problem, he walked away and focused on something else,” Knickmeyer says. “He’d come back to it minutes or years later, but he didn’t waste a lot of time scratching his head. He moved to something else so he could still work fast.” He loved gunite, a spray-on concrete, because it meant instant gratification: He only had a certain amount of time to carve before it hardened. “He’d just start shooting, and the lizards and serpents would start coming out of the gunite,” says Knickmeyer. “Like in Turtle Park: He kind of had ideas, not dead specific, but he’d order the concrete anyway, and have the truck on its way before you even had the form set. He liked to be forced to act.
“He wasn’t a perfectionist in the usual sense, with everything plumb and square and the joints perfect,” Knickmeyer adds. Bob liked things alive, organic, breathing, changing. He hated squares because they were too stable; he wanted the energy of curves, no dead ends or hard corners.
Philpott points out that Bob’s forms “move around, dive into each other, appear and disappear and reappear. Having things play against each other was very important—having it be as if there were no one thing in control, but multiple principles competing against each other in almost a survival of the fittest.”
Communicating that need for motion and creative tension…wasn’t easy. Bob was famous for his mumble, his partial instructions, his explosion of frustration if a brilliant idea was rendered “insipid” or “mundane.” Sketches were too flat for him; he made models and drew with rebar, bending it into 3-D shapes.
He’d been obsessed with shapes since he was a kid, lying in bed at night, staring at his ceiling and seeing creatures. He was obsessed with light, too. “God forbid you put anything in front of a window,” Diehl groans. “Blocking natural light was just the worst thing you could do. In the lofts, he put mirrors all over the place, so he could stretch that light as far as possible.”
Bob could look at a bulldozer and imagine its underside framing an entrance; look at the bases of parking-lot lights and see the columns of a gazebo; look at an old cement hopper and see the gazebo’s roof. His widow, Melissa Giovanna Zompa Cassilly, who is also an artist, remembers Bob moving rocks around on the beach in Hawaii. “We’re in Lavaland,” she teased him, making an analogy to his Cementland project. In Costa Rica, he said, “Aw, I would put a hole in there, so the wind comes through that way, and make sure all these waves could come through here, and get these trees to…”
Steck remembers a day at the Cassillys’ sheep farm, years ago. “I’m sitting on the porch spinning wool, and Bob and Gail are sitting on the porch swing, and they start talking about a branch on a tree, and the next thing I know, Bob jumps off the porch, shimmies up the tree, chops off this one offending branch, and comes back. And they both say, ‘Yeah, that looks better.’
“The farm looks like it’s been there 100 years, and he made it all,” she adds. “He’d say, ‘This is where the lake is going to come,’ and I’d say, ‘Right, who’s going to swim in a muddy puddle?’ And sure enough, the next summer it’s filled up into a clear lake 30 feet deep, and I’m swimming in it. He moved the road, so you had better views on the drive in. Every vista has been fooled with; you just don’t realize it.”
It seems an act of arrogance, carving nature itself—except that he did it with such knowledge and love. An act of supreme confidence, then? Not even that, Gail says: No question ever arose. “That branch had to go. Something visually wrong to him was on fire; it screamed.”
His aesthetic was anything but consumerist. He liked patina, carried an old board around with him for months looking for the right place to put it. He wanted peashooters and slingshots in the gift shop; when shop manager Stephanie Von Drasek suggested T-shirts, he said, “People would really buy those?” He was oblivious to pop culture. As a teenager hitchhiking in upstate New York, he saw cars abandoned by the road and thought someone had dropped a bomb. It was Woodstock.
Bob loved ornament and whim and nature and real materials, hated slick plastic and stark, hard-edged minimalism. When he and Giovanna were building a loft, she was heavily pregnant. “Can’t we just put the toilet in now?” she wailed. “Do we have to haul in this massive piece of marble?” Indeed, they did. “He was repulsed by the modern,” she says, “by anything that looked cookie-cutter or from a kit or anything that was hip and ‘in.’ He really was an old soul. Probably ancient.”
He was also a Romantic, the Antoni Gaudi of St. Louis. Images flowed unfiltered. “He had no internal critic,” graphic designer Tom Kavanaugh says, and there’s envy in his voice, but also awed caution. There was something fierce in Bob’s work. “Even if he was working on a tranquil garden, it felt powerful,” Gail says.
When they were together in their son’s hospital room after he was shot this summer, sitting on the windowsill close to his bed while he slept, they talked in the old, open way for the first time in a decade. “You know, we both still suffer from the same pathology,” Bob said quietly. She smiled and didn’t answer; she knew exactly what he meant. He was far more ambitious, his scope vast: He built pyramids; she pruned shrubs. But they both worked with a compulsive, meticulous urgency.
“He thought of his talent, experienced his talent, as a pathology,” she says. “That was always the word he used. Not a disease he wanted to cure, but a beloved demon inside him that spoke and drove him. He loved the craziness and the havoc, the creative chaos that it caused. But he was keenly aware of the consequences, the hurt that it brought. And ultimately, he felt like he had no choice.”
Somebody once persuaded Bob to set up a Facebook page. He didn’t use it, but he did list a favorite quote: “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“We didn’t have money to buy quality materials, so the only way to obtain those was salvage, and then it became a duty, to salvage these beautiful materials,” Gail explains. “They were like damsels in distress, and he would run to the rescue on his white horse. Once he did, it was a no-brainer: You have all these good things; how can you make anything bad?”
Salvaging for himself—often in the dark of night—was the real fun. “When he found something unusual, he got so excited he’d actually fumble with words for 10 or 15 seconds,” Danisi recalls. “His mind was just filled with ideas, and they were trying to escape out of his mouth, but there were too many.” He could find a use for anything. He covered the trash cans at City Museum with stacked pellet makers, because he hated anything that looked “bought.” Surveying the odd bits he scavenged, you start to understand what it means for an object to have character.
You also realize how much he hated waste. “He’d see somebody using too many paper towels and just go nuts,” Diehl says. “Although if there was something he didn’t like and it took a week to redo it, a big expense and a lot of time, that didn’t matter!” Bob refused a lid or straw with his soda, and he’d pull a piece of sandpaper back out of a trash can if it had a little grit left. At Cementland, his unfinished masterwork north of downtown, he strategically routed the trucks that were dumping fill so the 70,000-pound trucks would do the soil-compaction for him.
“He eschewed the term, but he recycled pretty much everything he encountered,” notes Richard Callow, a longtime friend and neighbor who’s handled media for City Museum. “Things showed their value to him in being reused. That was as true for people as it was for things. Bob wasn’t really comfortable with someone he hadn’t fired. Or divorced.”
DeFilippo saw the same parallel: “Who looks at an escalator and says, ‘I can make a curving wall of that if I turn it on its side?’ And he did that with people, too. He found value.” His eye recognized talent in folks so quirky, nobody else would have hired them. He saved his sculpting for objects; people, he took whole.
“He loved my character flaws,” Giovanna says, her voice catching. “He loved all the things about me that I hated, whether it was my nose or my inability to think I was strong. He loved and embraced the things about me that nobody else ever had.”
By refraining from judgment, Bob collected a family of intensely loyal employees. They learned to speak Cassilly, reading a blueprint in a swooping gesture or a muttered half-sentence. They joked that they were The City Museum Engineers: Creating the Impossible for the Insane. But they made his dreams their own.
In return, he took care of them like an old-fashioned papa. When Erwin mentioned he was taking medicine for high blood pressure, Cassilly “got all worried. He said, ‘Hit me, punch me! Do whatever you gotta do to relieve the stress.’” He saw the parking-lot attendant’s worn-out shoes and told him to take whatever money was in the till at the moment and buy new ones.
The paterfamilias role held huge appeal. “When the kids were young, just coming home and having the kids yell ‘Daddy!’ and run and jump on him, that would tickle him more than anything,” Gail says. “He was very old-fashioned in his domestic sensibilities, very contradictory in that sense. He wanted Ozzie and Harriet, but there was hardly any part of him that could sustain it.”
Giovanna says he’d mellowed in the seven years of their marriage, gotten to be more of a homebody. He was still shy. “I said early on, ‘Sometimes you seem so unapproachable,’ and he was shocked to hear that. He said, ‘Really?’ I think he was kind of disconnected from himself. He didn’t see the things other people saw. And he got restless around a lot of people. I had to find the perfect balance of making sure there was air, constant circulation—he didn’t like to be confined in an office. You could be the most interesting person in the world and he’d start looking like he was panicking.”
Years ago, Kavanaugh met with Bob and Gail about renting City Museum for an Artists and Writers Ball. He says Bob looked uncomfortable. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I take off my shirt? I’m a little hot.’” Gail closed her eyes, keeping them shut a fraction longer than a blink. A few minutes later, Bob said, “Is it OK if I put my feet up on the table?” Kavanaugh nodded. When he explained what he wanted to do, Bob eagerly offered to give him the entire museum space for free. Gail said, “Er…no. We won’t be doing that.” Then Bob said he liked the idea of the body-painting contest, but people shouldn’t wear T-shirts—and he would like to participate, and he would also like to be a judge. Gail straightened that out, too. Bob shrugged and made a relieved exit, just glad the meeting was over.
“He was best with stone, dirt, and metal,” Callow remarks. “None of those things is more complicated than the laws of physics. People are more complicated, less reliable. And dealing with them sometimes required more thought and time than he had the patience to give them.” That’s why he did better with children than with adults, Callow adds, “because they were more like clay than like humans.”
Bob’s social awkwardness left him wild-eyed at times, desperate for escape. He’d hide out in the stonemason’s shop, carving in peace, dreading the moment somebody tracked him down. On Giovanna’s first trip to the museum, she was seven months pregnant. “Follow me,” he said, and crawled into the belly of the whale. She heard people calling, “Hey, have you seen Bob?” “Anyone seen Bob? He’s got big trouble…” She and Bob hid and giggled for at least 30 minutes.
Knickmeyer called him “a 4-year-old with a checkbook”; others placed him at age 7, 10, or 12. Before City Museum “was even a complete thought,” Philpott says, “Bob would bring buckets into the parking garage, hundreds and hundreds of buckets stacked up to the ceiling, and tie rope on the ceiling and swing into the buckets and knock them down.” When video artist Bill Streeter introduced friends from California to Bob, he talked for half a minute and then said, “C’mon, let’s go on a slide!” When kids climbed the outside of City Museum, Bob joined them—but he was getting beaten in the race, so he knocked out a seventh-floor window, climbed inside, and said, “I’m done.”
Was he just an overgrown kid?
“It was very true in the sense that he just did not want to be an adult,” Gail says. “He saw adults as on their last leg; they just weren’t any fun. They had conceded to the average and the mediocre and didn’t know how to play anymore. But no, I wouldn’t define him as a big child. He was far too intelligent.”
He’d gotten to page 112 of The Golden Ratio when he died. The only TV he watched was The History Channel or National Geographic. (“Nope,” he’d tell the narrator, “you’re off by 100 years.”) He lived for The New York Times’ Science Tuesday and knew all about global warming and Egypt and stalactites (he got really excited when they formed in a building at Cementland). He understood enough structural engineering to create marvels. (“That fountain on the roof?” Erwin says. “That
shouldn’t work.”)
“It wasn’t so much that he was this kid, all about children and butterflies and unicorns,” Giovanna says. “He was intrigued by the child’s imagination and the child’s ability. He would bring [our son] Robert all over the museum and just watch. He wanted to see where his face lit up.”
So maybe it’s more that he was on the kids’ side?
“One of the few rules enforced by staff at City Museum is that minors be accompanied by an adult,” Callow says. “Bob used that rule as the tension for a lot of his art. Holes in the floor led to tunnels that came up out of sight of their entrances, separating adults and kids. Spans connected platforms that could be reached faster by crawling than by walking around. To keep up with their kids, adults had to join them or lose them. That only bothered the adults.”
When an emergency-demolition order went through for the majestic old tower of St. Henry’s Church on the South Side, Bruce Gerrie (now City Museum’s architecture curator) called Bob, who got so upset, he put regular gas in his Dodge diesel truck. It died halfway across town. Gerrie came and got him, and at the last possible minute, they locked themselves into Gerrie’s white soft-top Jeep right in front of the bulldozers. Police officers eventually managed to extract them from the Jeep, handcuff them, and put them in the back of a police car. Bob pulled out his phone.
“Who are you calling?” asked Gerrie.
“The police.”
Bob didn’t fear the law any more than he feared heights or failure. His best-known infractions were the permitting violations—how could he tell the city what he was going to build when his plans would only take shape as he worked?
“It wasn’t that Bob had a glaring disregard for authority,” Tucker insists. “I describe him as creative lightning. He’d start chipping away at something and not know himself what it was going to be, so the permits had to come afterward.”
Still, he did like the fun of breaking stupid rules. He took his youngest sons, Dylan and Robert III, to the Missouri Botanical Garden and saw a cool boulder. “C’mon, let’s go climb on it,” he said, and the boys said, “Dad, there’s a fence around it!” In Forest Park, Bob jumped in the lakes. At Cementland, he told a photographer, “Well, I could give you permission to take photos here, but then I would rob you of the experience of going behind my back to do it.”
Bob also threw tantrums worthy of a 2-year-old (Steck says he once tossed a tow-truck driver across his truck). Then there was the relentless mischief and the sexual license.
“His desire to be passionate and erotic and attached to the Greek muses was in tension with his upbringing,” observes Philpott. “One day he had sprayed gunite inside the fish tank, and he was carving a mermaid, and the mermaid didn’t have a shirt. And then his mother came by—Judy was his biggest supporter; she’d show up in the middle of the night with food for everybody. The very next day, there was an arm across the mermaid’s chest. He’d added more concrete and then carved it down, overnight. It was almost like the piece was alive, and she’d gotten modest.”
Steck remembers Bob, at an erotic art show, playfully inscribing penises on women’s bodies—with a Sharpie. Others remember him drawing on people’s faces at City Museum parties; most were delighted, although a few headed for the restroom to frantically scrub off the impropriety.
When Steck threw her first nice, grown-up party in Lafayette Square, Bob brought a 13-foot boa constrictor. “He put it in the first-floor bathroom and had women close their eyes and touch it,” she says, not pausing, getting it all out. “Then they said, ‘The snake’s gone!’ We go down in the basement, and they see its head; it’s in the chase. They take apart my vanity and start throwing all the stuff out, like sanitary pads, and I’m so embarrassed, and they’re throwing ice water on the snake to make it go into the basement. In the end I got a really nice bathroom out of it, with a mosaic floor…”
Months later, Bob’s snake went AWOL again and turned up in a stack of mattresses Bob was donating to a homeless shelter. “These poor guys, they’d been trying to sober up, and here’s this snake in between their mattresses,” Steck says. “They probably went right back to the bottle.”
Bob pranked everybody—including the city, when he painted “Help!” and “We’ve been slimed!” on his turtle sculptures, in protest against their prophylactic maintenance coating. But his fight with the Turtle Park benefactress probably started earlier, when he unveiled a turtle humping another turtle. The City Museum cave wall was originally going to be a giant woman, and children would climb up on her. “The serpent fence—you ever look at that from above?” DeFilippo asks. “It’s the man’s view of his penis.”
“That was his grand persona,” says Philpott. “He was the bad boy, part of the fringe of society, and he was successful. He liked that; he liked the fact that City Museum was for bad boys, not girls.”
Bad boys are, by definition, daredevils.
“We tried to climb Longs Peak in Colorado,” recalls Gerrie. “It’s 14,255 feet high. We hit a whiteout, so we went over to these icicles of rock and got onto this glacier. Bob fell through, came out about 300 feet below, and deliberately slid toward the edge—a 1,000-foot drop.”
For a time, Gerrie lived with Bob on the Burgess, a 1932 dredge that was five stories high, moored 400 feet out in the Mississippi River. Every night, Gerrie says, Bob would jump off one end of the boat, swim downstream to the other end, grab an ancient piece of rope, and climb out.
The man was half monkey; he climbed tall buildings and hung from the neck of the Dallas Zoo’s giraffe sculpture as fearlessly as other people eat oatmeal.
“I don’t think he acknowledged danger,” Streeter says. “He was sort of oblivious to it. Danger was just another rule he didn’t want to deal with.”
Knickmeyer shakes his head dubiously. “He just walked across the roof. A lot of these panels are ready to fall in. I don’t think he was oblivious to it.”
“Don’t ask me to judge a man’s concept of danger when he can climb up onto a praying mantis and ride it through the air,” DeFilippo says. “Danger? It’s part of the game.”
The day after Bob closed on Cementland, he persuaded Tucker to climb with him 100 feet up to the trusses and 200 feet across. “If you took a wrong step you’d die. There wasn’t even a flat part on the trusses to put your foot,” Tucker recalls. So was Bob an adrenaline junkie? Tucker shakes his head. “If you have confidence in your abilities, it’s not risk.”
So did he crave danger, or just its illusion?
“Danger, for him, equaled challenge,” Gail says. “It was something that would keep him from the mediocre, keep him alive. But he never wanted to subject others to real danger. For them, it was the illusion. He wanted them to get as close to it as they possibly could, and he took it to the farthest degree possible because he wanted people to feel the impact. He felt people had to get off their couches and away from their television screens and experience something real.”
Says Callow, “Bob liked fun and fear; he thought that one intensified the other. When she was little, Bob would send his daughter and me out onto scaffolding to see where Daisy would stop or I would start to cry. Those are the places he put handrails.”
Bob firmly believed it was better to scrape your knee and develop confidence than to fabricate fears in your mind and never really live. And so he put Alison Ferring out on that piece of fiberglass that keeps the school bus half off the roof, then went away. He climbed Cementland’s 280-foot smokestack with his children. And earlier this year, when a warier 22-year-old Daisy turned down his invitation to climb it again, he was dismayed.
“He made fun of me for how scared of things I’d become,” she says. “He would tell me that I need to live life on the edge to live a happy life, because if you live your life sheltered, you are not getting everything out of life.”
After a conversation with his mother, it all makes sense. “When I was younger, I was afraid of heights,” she mentions in passing, “and Bob was always trying to get me over it. One time on a camping trip, he made me climb this high tree, actually dragged me up it. I was scared to death. But it helped, and I was so grateful. Before that, I couldn’t walk over a viaduct without being frightened. Now I can climb up high anywhere.”
When accidents started to happen at City Museum, Bob found himself settling so many lawsuits, he put a mocking list of lawyers who’d sued him in the museum lobby. Only two accidents were serious: an 18-month-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, both with head injuries after falling from City Museum’s MonstroCity.
“When the toddler fell, our son was near the same age, and we had sat in that same spot over and over with him,” Giovanna says. “When Bob found out that had happened, he was devastated. He stood there—much like we all did in front of the bulldozer—not understanding how that could have happened. I’d never seen him cross T’s and dot I’s so much as after that. He said, ‘I messed this up.’”
Other accidents were minor, trumped-up, or willfully stupid. Oddly enough, what Bob’s employees emphasize is how safe he made them feel. First, because he was fearless; second, because he was so protective. “We just knew Bob would never let anything happen to us,” Von Drasek says.
But he did have a few fears of his own.
He was scared, his whole life, of mediocrity, terrified of sinking into the average and the mundane.
He was scared he’d die a long, slow, painful death from cancer, as his father had. Every morning, he’d show up at Cementland and—before he started climbing the smokestack, hoisting mammoth trees, or bulldozing a hill at a 30-degree angle—put on his sunscreen and his hat.
He was scared by what happened to his son Max. This past August, two men broke into Max’s apartment and shot him several times with an assault rifle. Watching Max suffer, knowing he could have died, Bob’s heart broke open. “Something came together in Bob that I wasn’t sure would have ever come together,” Gail says softly. “It felt…real. And it was what everybody needed.” After almost a decade of anger and bitterness, they grew easy with each other again, and he did everything in his power to help his son heal.
Finally, he was scared there wouldn’t be enough money to finish Cementland, his last and biggest project.
But he never let fear stop him.
“I remember one of his best buddies died suddenly, at 40,” Gail says. “I had to go tell Bob, and he seemed stricken, but then he had to go back to work. I remember him saying, ‘It’s so final. It’s so final. I better get back to work.’”
People who come to City Museum often feel like they’re rattling around inside Bob Cassilly’s brain. When he dug the tunnels, they felt, to the feverishly imaginative grown-ups, like his subconscious. But it was at Cementland that DeFilippo said, “Someday I’d like to look inside your mind,” and Cassilly responded, “You’re in it.”
Everything in Bob’s life culminated at Cementland: the push to go bigger and bigger, the edgy danger, the rescuing and reusing, the love of earth and water and sky. The chaos, too: He left no will, and Cementland’s future will be determined by the lawyers he detested on principle.
For a 2007 piece on City Museum, Bob told Post-Dispatch reporter Diane Toroian Keaggy, “You shouldn’t assume things are going to last forever. It would be great if it all collapsed onto itself like Camelot. We would have had this brief shining ‘ah’ moment.”
City Museum’s hardly gone dark. Erwin recently talked with a woman whose daughter, studying in Turkey, heard a lecturer cite it as a model.
Will Cementland be Bob’s Camelot instead?
Knickmeyer gives a tour of the former Missouri Portland Cement Company site at the edge of the Mississippi River. He starts with the “clinker” (pre-cement mix) building, inside of which Bob wanted to erect a grove of 6-foot-wide white oak trees, with waterfalls and an island. Around the workshop, he created a moat that would be part of a canoe path. Hulking pieces of machinery would hum, their wheels slowly rotating on solar-cell energy. He had a castle built of cobblestones from city streets; a path from its turret would lead to cottonwood treehouses. “Bridges will join all the silos—he wanted you to be able to walk completely around Cementland, 120 feet high, without ever coming down,” Knickmeyer says. “There’s even been talk of a shuttle boat from the Arch”—Bob also owns land on the other side of the Mississippi, with a barge dock out in the river.
“The view from the top of the pyramids is awesome,” Knickmeyer says. “You look down the river, and there’s St. Louis.” Covered with soft, emerald-green crown vetch, the pyramids were sculpted entirely from fill that people paid Bob for the privilege of dumping. “He’d done so much on the bulldozer, it was like an extension of his hands,” Knickmeyer says, then freezes, staring across at the machine, still parked aslant in the spot where Bob’s body was discovered. “See that long diagonal coming down the hill? He was working on a new footpath, and the bulldozer slipped on a piece of concrete.”
He sighs. “Autumn was his favorite time, when the hills and pyramids were still green, and you got these long shadows. I imagine the evening he died, it was perfect.”
A minute later, he shakes off the grief and says briskly, “It’s still pretty raw, but everybody’s thinking maybe we can do something worthwhile to get the public in to see in the near future. We’ve gotta get sewers, water, electricity…”
He trails off. “It’s hard, being out here without him,” he says. “As time goes on, it’s not softening.”
Hiking with Gail in Colorado, Bob refused to carry water, saying, “There’s babbling brooks everywhere!” They climbed all day. “It’s getting dark,” Gail told him, “and we have not found a babbling brook yet.” He went off with a saucepan to find water. Hours later, he returned, saucepan full. “It’s not looking yummy, but it’s enough to cook dinner,” Gail says. “Then I see that his socks are all wet. ‘What happened to your socks?’ ‘Oh, you don’t want to know.’ ‘Yeah, I really do, what happened to your socks?’ ‘Well, I couldn’t find any water, and then there were these rocks with water running over them, but the water wasn’t deep enough…’” He’d soaked it up with his socks and wrung them into the pan.
He was always resourceful. And underneath all the genius and rebellion, there was something that felt almost like innocence. He wore shorts, drove a truck, rarely had cash on him. “He’d eat your lunch if you told him where it was,” Steck says. When City Museum was named one of the top 30 most-seen museums in the world by Delta Sky magazine, Erwin couldn’t get Bob to realize what a big deal it was. “He just didn’t care. But he loved it if a little girl or boy would come tell him how much fun it was. He’d become shy all of a sudden.”
His simplicity kept things fresh; he never got numb to a project or to the world around him. “He believed in beautiful weather,” Gail says. “No matter what was on the agenda, if it turned out to be a beautiful day and you didn’t take advantage of it, you were just an asshole. I’d have regular things I was supposed to do, and he’d say, ‘C’mon, we’ve got to go on a canoe trip.’”
The beloved stream at City Museum is the stream that ran behind his childhood home. There are caves because he dug one out of that stream’s bank, and because a cave was the setting of what J. Watson Scott delicately calls “Bob’s first amorous experience.” There’s water dripping because when he canoed with his kids, they’d stop at a certain spot where they could catch water in their open mouths.
It’s Bob’s world—yet kids are so into it, they walk right into you without noticing. You glance down and see an older boy hoisting himself up from a narrow passage like he’s entering Narnia. You follow a little girl into a cave and it’s dark, the floor bumpy and uneven, and you catch yourself feeling annoyed because you almost tripped. You expected everything to be paved and sanitized and denatured. But that would deprive you of real experience.
The paradox of Bob Cassilly is that he worked with great specificity, entirely for himself, and by doing so, reached what was vast and universal. He gave other people exactly what they hadn’t known they wanted. And he held nothing back.
“He lived on the edge,” Tucker says. “To the best of his abilities, to the best of his talents. Every step he took, he knew it could be his last. But that made every step he took that much more alive.”
