semperfiona | City Museum

I remember the other thing I wanted to post about from this weekend. Saturday my parents and I took Rosa to St. Louis's City Museum. Their slogan is "Unlike any museum you've seen," and it's true. I've been to museums all over the world, children's museums, art museums, history museums...There is nothing else like it. I've been there before, but I had forgotten how absolutely indescribably cool it is. I'll try to describe it anyway.

The best way I can describe the City Museum is as a giant art installation that you can play in. The whole first floor and mezzanine are given over to tunnels and caves and treehouses to climb over and under, slide down, or slither through. You can spend time in the belly of a whale, or the nest of a giant imaginary bird. The second floor contains studio space for various artists, whom you can watch as they work, and the third floor has museum-type exhibits.

That is, if the museum in question is a museum of the surreal. Okay, there's an architecture exhibit hall that is fairly museum-standard, except for the fact that many of the exhibits are just piled on shelves in random order and unlabeled, and there's an exhibit hall of changing exhibitions which is currently displaying "American Celtic" paintings, and once had an exhibit of dinosaur fossils from the Soviet Union. Then there is a functioning model train (1/8 scale) which carries small children around in circles. And there is also the "Museum of Mirth, Mayhem and Mystery", which displays various esoterica of the quasi-occult like fortunetelling machines, an alien baby Elvis in a coffin, an aluminum Pegasus...all in an environment reminiscent of a 1950's diner. There is the "Everyday Circus", which does hourly shows using audience participation and jokey stunts.

And outdoors...oh my gods. An all-new "Humongous Human Habitrail" (text from their own website) called MonstroCity. Rosa and I climbed through almost the whole thing. It's a bit like the indoor first floor, only on a scale that adults can much more readily climb in. It rises three stories in the air, with wire tubes, tunnels, and catwalks. Two relic airplanes. A fire truck. A castle. A crane. A touring tram. All connected by loops of heavy wire or I-beams or catwalks for climbing. Not for the acrophobic. Oddly enough, although I am afraid of ladders, I'm not afraid of heights. It's whether or not things wiggle while I'm standing on them. Everything in MonstroCity was very stable.