There’s a joke among the Cassilly Crew, the ragtag team of artisan builders City Museum founder Bob Cassilly handpicked to bring his creative visions to life: “It just needs to be moved 3 inches.”
To get the punchline, know that projects in the City Museum don’t really begin or end. They start, then pause, then start again (with a twist) and repeat. Once a slide or climber or sculpture is moved, it’s a sure bet that it’ll be moved again—maybe back to where it was, maybe somewhere else, maybe transformed into something entirely new.
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This isn’t “Nothing gold can stay.” This is “Nothing gold should stay because we just salvaged this amazing iron and glass, and wouldn’t it be cool if…” Not even the rules once enforced by Cassilly himself are immovable. A simple sign pointing new mothers to the fourth-floor nursing room goes unnoticed by visitors hurtling toward grander adventures, but Cassilly would never have allowed it. It takes away from the thrill of the hunt, he always said.
If anything should have halted City Museum’s persistent growth, it was the death of the visionary sculptor. Instead, his crew keeps the momentum going, embracing each member’s talents outside the limits of Cassilly’s unifying direction.
“All of a sudden, people are stepping up to the plate that weren’t before,” says Kurt Knickmeyer, a friend of Cassilly’s since 1981, when Cassilly made a sculpture of Knickmeyer’s head that won a high school art award. “Now that he’s gone, all these people get to rise to the top. It’s not like we get on a project and stay on a project. There are no limits to what we can do. No governors.”
City Museum had two years’ worth of unfinished projects waiting when Cassilly died. Now, there are more than 15 years’ worth of projects lined up: art installations that promise to put the word “museum” back in City Museum, slides going out windows, a giant spider shooting a web that kids can climb up…
“He looks down on it and smiles, I think,” crew member Bob Heinemann says of Cassilly. “We don’t step out far from Bob’s style. His style is burned into us.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
“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.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
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.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
“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.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
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.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
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.
