Downtown St. Louis has an attraction where you can descend four floors on a five-story slide, crawl through reclaimed caves, and ride a vintage Ferris wheel on the roof — all inside a former shoe factory. City Museum, housed in the old International Shoe Company building on North 16th Street, opened in the 1990s and has been growing ever stranger and more wonderful since.
Sculptors Bob and Gail Cassilly led a team of artists who transformed the industrial space using salvaged concrete, rebar, plaster, and iron. The building's warehouse history is baked into the fun: the property's original spiral chutes, once used to send shoes down to shipping, inspired a museum-wide obsession with slides. There are now more than 30, including that five-story spiral. The museum keeps reinventing itself, too — its newest raw material is the rotation gear from the Millennium Hotel's demolished rooftop restaurant, purpose yet to be revealed.
Families can easily burn a full day here. Four floors plus a rooftop mean endless nooks to explore, and kids six and under get their own Toddler Town with mini slides and a ball pit. Look out for oddities like the world's largest pencil — a 76-foot No. 2 that out-does rival roadside giants — sitting in Skateless Park, a repurposed skate park with ramps and ropes. Up top (weather permitting), there's a vintage Big Eli Ferris wheel, a retired bus you can climb on, more giant slides, an enormous praying mantis sculpture, and sweeping views over St. Louis.
There's more depth than the playground reputation suggests. Much of the museum is effectively one giant sculpture built from the city's cast-offs. The fourth-floor Labyrinth weaves in glass from the Central Library, gears from the Mel Price Lock and Dam, and taxidermied squirrels from the St. Louis Zoo. Collections range from taxidermy butterflies to art slides from the Met. More conventionally, the St. Louis Art Gallery shows contemporary work, and Art City runs hands-on sessions in painting, printmaking, clay, and collage. On the third floor, Circus Harmony stages acrobatic and juggling performances — and visitors can book a class to try circus skills themselves.
Practical bits: daily tickets start at $20, with some areas costing extra, and closed-toe shoes are strongly advised (knee pads are sold in the gift shop, which tells you everything). Exhibits change over time, so repeat visits genuinely feel different. If you still have energy afterward, Forest Park — a short 10-minute drive away — makes a great afternoon add-on.
City Museum suits anyone who hates ropes and velvet barriers: curious adults, restless kids, and families hunting for a full-day outing that doesn't feel like a standard museum. It rewards wandering, revisiting, and touching literally everything.