remake/remodel

the thing i liked the most

I had meant to say something about this a long time ago, but I’ll say it now because I don’t want to forget about it, and because I don’t want to repeat this endlessly, every time I talk to someone that I haven’t talked to since a month ago:

The City Museum of St. Louis is the most wonderful place in this whole wide, stupid, beautiful world of ours.

I can’t adequately convey with my dumb, clumsy words the awe, fun, and splendor of this place, nor can I show you, you being there and me being here, the childlike, wide-eyed gesticulation that the thought of the place inspires in me. All I can think to do is to list, lazily, like a Nick Hornby, its many marvels:

• many and varied things to climb on
• several stories of caves! (also for climbing)
• slides!
• caves with slides!
• aquarium
• treehouse (also for climbing)
• indoor theater (plays only Max Fleischer cartoons and Little Rascals episodes)
• outdoor theater (plays The Goonies)
• two bars (indoor and outdoor)
• ferris wheel
• third floor skate park
• action figure display with Transformers!
• vintage toy display
• one ring circus
• old storefronts and facades of St. Louis past
• miscellaneous wonders, marvels, and sights to see (also for climbing)
• !!!

The museum is housed in an abandoned shoe factory, and everything is made from found objects and urban detritus; for example, the viking longboat with oars made from oversized industrial wrenches, or the cavern stair steps made from old satellite dishes. Everything is for touching and prodding; the City Museum is not the kind of museum that asks you to please be quiet and position yourself behind the black line while you murmur in awe before the masterpieces. It is a fundamentally tactile place — it’s the kind of museum that asks you to jump all over it, to crawl and slide through its nooks and crannies, to explore and interact, to possibly hurt yourself because nobody’s watching you while you crawl up the head of the monstrous stone carved kraken to get a better view of the giant whiskered catfish bobbling about below you. It’s a place where cantankerous jerks like me can mingle happily with screaming, overstimulated toddlers. There is too much fun and whimsy in this one place, and it can overcome the accreted misanthropies of any number of sour, workaday lifetimes.

I’m sorry — I have just become a brochure, I’ve used more exclamation points than is my right. But it’s worth it, somehow.