Was It Worth It?
City Museum

​Posted January 17, 2026, by Janet Wolfe

What It Is

City Museum’s website calls this attraction an “ever-evolving, always-thrilling, artist-built playground that you can walk into, spin around, climb up, slide down, crawl under, jump over, and swing across.”  

Built in an old shoe warehouse, it is, in fact, a four-floor, 600,000-square-foot marvel of more than 29,000 discarded artifacts and repurposed industrial materials.  Here, you’ll find explorable structures—including slides, tunnels, and caves—and displays made from statues, architectural remnants, and a slew of unusual odds and ends.  There’s even a bus, a ferris wheel, and an airplane that you can climb and explore.

Where It Is

St. Louis, Missouri

When We Went

July 2019

What We Did

Only a fraction of what’s possible.  We arrived in the evening and were immediately simultaneously amazed and overwhelmed.  We started outside and then worked our way through the floors as best we could.  

Among other things, we crawled through a human-sized slinky; walked through a castle tower made out of limestone from an East St. Louis Episcopal Church built in 1904; marveled at the colorful railing balusters made from rollers that had once been used in the mile-long converter system used in the shoe warehouse; “oohed” and “aahed” at vibrant mosaic portraits of fish on the floors and walls; walked and crawled through some really cool but dimly lit tunnels; and ran up and down the ramps of a skateless skatepark.

How Much We Spent

We don’t have records of what this cost us in 2019.  However, as of January 2026, tickets (required for ages 3 and up) are $23 at the door.  If you order online, tickets are only $20, but there is an $8 convenience fee added. Also, the $20/$23 tickets give you access to the four main floors only.  Access to Pinball Hall (this didn’t exist when we visited) is an additional $6.  Access to the rooftop may also be additional.

How Much Time We Spent There

I wasn’t the clock nazi back then that I am now, so the exact times we started and ended this adventure are lost in my memories, but I do believe we spent about two hours exploring City Museum.  You can easily spend all day.

What We Liked

This place was fascinating!  I wish we had been able to spend more time exploring the floors and discovering all of the creative ways City Museum incorporates and integrates original sculpturework by the museum’s founder, Bob Cassilly, with the unique and comically unassuming scrapped materials the museum collects and uses.

It’s a world that excited the kids and the kids in us: where walls flow with stainless steel pans, where giant metal slinkies are meant to be explored by both children and adults, and where knee pads are not only a smart item to bring with you but also a ticket add-on at the door.  Some slides even travel from one floor to the next.

Everything has a story and a history, and we happily bought the book, “Inside City Museum,” which describes the background of many of the museum’s pieces (literally), in the gift shop on our way out.

City Museum appears to have grown significantly since we were there in 2019.  And that, I think, is part of its charm.  What you see could be very different from what we saw.  The museum grows and changes with each new shipment of materials.  In fact, the concept-to-construction process at City Museum is immediate.  Our souvenir book says on the opening page, “When we get an idea here, we start building it that afternoon.”

What We Didn't Like

It would be very easy to lose your people (especially children) in this building.  There are so many places to explore and things to crawl through, and many of them are not well lit.  When we left, we joked about how many cameras they’d need to have in and around the building to make sure there weren’t people hiding in the museum's many, many tunnels, nooks, and crannies.  If your kids are older and have cell phones, finding them could be significantly easier.  For younger kids, City Museum recommends identifying a meeting place ahead of time, labeling your littles with your contact information, and sticking close to them at all times, particularly on slides.

Was it worth it? 

Yes.  We are grateful to our waiter at The Brown Hotel for encouraging us to go.  Both my husband and I had seen City Museum listed as an attraction of interest on travel sites, but we weren’t quite sure what it was and didn’t think too hard about it.  I’m so glad we went.  You really have to see it to understand it.


For more information, visit https://citymuseum.org/.

Did You Know?  City Museum’s most notable features include:

• one 3,000 pound praying mantis on the roof
  
• one decommissioned school bus (it balances on the southwest corner of the rooftop)​
• more than 30 slides, including one 5-story spiral slide
  
• caves galore
  
• two aircraft fuselages
  
• a life-sized whale slide
  
• free circus shows
  
• thousands of things found in outhouses
  
• a vintage (and rideable) ferris wheel bought from a traveling circus
  
• a 76-foot long working pencil containing 4,000 pounds of graphite
  
• 100 Twinkie pans
  
• a place, Toddler Town, made just for kids 6 and under