A Night of Mirth, Mystery, and Mayhem

On October 1, the Greater St. Louis Chapter of CSI will host a party at City Museum – and for the past several months even our most experienced specifiers have struggled to find adequate words to describe the experience that awaits our colleagues who visit us during CONSTRUCT 2015. It’s an indoor/outdoor playground for kids of all ages. It’s a warehouse of salvaged architectural ornament. It has a ten-story spiral slide in the middle of the building, two airplanes as part of an outdoor jungle gym, and a school bus on the roof. And it all started out 105 years ago as the headquarters for the largest of several manufacturers that made St. Louis the focus of footwear during the first half of the 20^th century.

The latter part of the 19^th century saw St. Louis transition from  distribution hub to manufacturing center, and no industry, except perhaps brewing, dominated our economy more than shoemaking. International Shoe, formed by a merger of Roberts Johnson & Rand Shoe Company with Peters Shoe Company in 1911, headquartered at the corner of Washington Avenue and 15^th Street in an ornate stone office building designed by Theodore Link, architect of St. Louis Union Station.

In 1930, a 10-story brick building was added behind the office to house a shoe factory, one of 91 the company would ultimately own, and warehouse space. Due to its size and production capacity, International Shoe manufactured most of this country’s military issue footwear during both World Wars, and continued to increase production and profits during the prosperity of the early 1950’s. International Shoe made four out of every five pairs of shoes made in America – Red Goose, Poll Parrot, and Florsheim are some familiar brands.  But when economic conditions drove manufacturing overseas, International Shoe became a more diversified company, Interco, divesting itself of many of the original shoe labels.

By 1983, both office building and factory were mostly vacant – neglected, deteriorating, and water damaged – when sculptor Bob Cassilly purchased the two building complex for 69 cents a square foot. Cassilly had owned a fiberglass and cast stone fabrication company specializing in architectural and landscape ornamentation that merged traditional motifs with his own unique artistic perspective. This led to a series of creature themed installations: Turtle Park Playground in St. Louis, Hippo Playground in New York, a 45-foot-long squid for the St. Louis Zoo, and a giant giraffe for the Dallas zoo.

Cassilly pioneered the redevelopment of the Washington Avenue commercial strip, a deteriorated area of downtown without much hope for the future. The International Shoe office building was renovated and repurposed, but it was in the factory that Cassilly and crew did their most creative work. Using mostly salvaged and surplus materials, they began transforming a rather non-descript industrial building into a wonderland. Fiberglass strips used by Boeing in airplane fuselages became icicles hanging from the first floor ceiling. A stainless steel cooling tube from an Anheuser-Busch beer tank was transformed into a huge Slinky. Walls were created using discarded cafeteria serving line pans, milk bottles, and other construction and industrial odds and ends.

In 1997, the building opened to the public as City Museum and it has added new areas and attractions ever since: MonstroCity, Enchanted Caves and Shoe Shaft, Vault Room, and Architecture Hall. With over 700,000 people visiting the museum each year, it can get quite boisterous and crowded. But on October 1, the Greater St. Louis Chapter of CSI will have exclusive use of the facility for a five-hour long private party for our friends visiting CONSTRUCT 2015. Registration is available at this website [www.constructshow.com]. We’ll be serving St. Louis themed food and drink in the Vault Room and in Architecture Hall, we’ll have local musical entertainment, and we’ll send you on a scavenger hunt if you so desire.

Come explore this most unique museum, funhouse, labyrinth, junkyard – it’s a work of art and a labor of love. Our dress code for the evening: “playground casual.” And surprisingly for a building that once led the world in the variety and number of shoes it manufactured, there is a strict limitation on footwear: only “sneakers or closed-toe, closed-heel shoes” will be permitted. There will be no limits, however, on fun.

 

Getting there from CONSTRUCT 2015:

Walking: 15 minutes, 8 blocks. Head west on Washington Avenue to 16^th Steet, turn north and the museum is a block up on your right.

Shuttles: The Greater St. Louis Chapter will be running a school bus shuttle to the museum. Check with our desk at the convention center for details.

Bus: Downtown Trolley (99 Bus) loops around downtown.  The trip from Convention Center to the museum is 5 minutes. The fare is $2.25 each way.

Taxi: Budget $7 each way.