Meet the People Keeping City Museum Alive Since Bob Cassilly’s Death

“Monsters just need a hug,” Laurie Marrs says with a laugh when asked whether she’s trying to bring nightmares to life. City Museum’s longtime mosaic artist, Marrs is building a horned monster to leer at kids from beneath a set of stairs. Cassilly “wouldn’t have had the patience,” she says, for her current method of building mosaics, which involves cutting shapes precisely rather than breaking a piece of glass and improvising. But Marrs says she still follows his vision: “More, more,bigger, bigger.”

Kurt Knickmeyer dreams of a day when City Museum will realize its own manifest destiny.“We’re trying to go right to the boundaries,” he says. “I like to think everything will be connected right to the roof.” So far, all is going according to plan. Staffers are designing one slide to go out a third-floor window and another off the rooftop water tower, which has a picture of Cassilly on top. “It was Bob driving everything,” Knickmeyer says. “He set this whole thing in motion. We’re really just filling in.” 

 “Once I was given free rein, I got to do crazy things,” says Mary Levi, who spent two weeks looking for the perfect fake rat to put in the torture chamber at the bottom of the brand-new castle that houses City Museum’s parking attendant. Once she found the right one, Levi charred the fur with a lighter to make it extra disgusting.Director Rick Erwin says he sometimes puts her on mundane, repetitive jobs just so she’ll get worked up and “release the Kraken” of her creativity. “She is a force,” he says.

Joe Bacus sculpted a sharp-beaked, winged creature while working at City Museum several years ago. (Is it an eagle? An Archaeopteryx? Bacus shrugs. “I always thought it was a griffin.”) Now he’s back, and director Rick Erwin has tasked him with expanding his sculpture through the roof, creating a climbing tunnel between the two floors. Like the rest of the museum, he says, “it’s kind of a work in progress.”

Ash Kaempf spends much of her time on the roof, building City Museum to the sky. (Technically, the new slides she’s welded extend the 12-story museum to 14 stories.) On top, a beacon flashes Morse code to downtown and beyond. Cassilly Crew members want to find a way to let visitors control the message on their phones, but for now the beacon is Rickrolling, repeating lines from Rick Astley’s 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It’s one more prank in a building full of gags, but sometimes the message feels like a supernatural call between the crew and their never-forgotten leader: Never gonna give you up/Never gonna let you down/Never gonna run around and desert you.

"I’m really testing out the waters here,” says Max Cassilly, who’s taken over Beatnik Bob’s, making the tucked-away carnival-inspired watering hole into his own domain within his father’s creation. Last summer, he was still figuring out the new menu. (So far the coffee, roasted by St. Louis’ own Stringbean Coffee, is the biggest hit.) Like his father before him, Cassilly knows that everything at City Museum is subject to change. “You tear something down; you move it 4 feet to the left and then rebuild it,” he says. “We like to do an idea, drop it for two years, and then pick it back up again.”