The City Museum
Starting Monday morning with a happy tale of a trip after Crystal Ball to one of the most unique places I've ever been to -- the City Museum of St. Louis...
As always, all small images are thumbnails which can be clicked to expand. Enjoy! :-)
I'd only been to St. Louis twice before I began my residency at Wash U -- and both of those were for interviews for medical school and residency, making beeline from airport to medical center and back again. Jesse had been there more often, for dance events. It was at one of those that she had discovered the City Museum. And she made me promise before I left Cynnabar that I wouldn't make my first visit to the City Museum until she could come along to share that first visit with me.
And so it was, the day after Crystal Ball (of which tales are forthcoming, of course) that niquerio and aelkiss and I and a giddy Jesse went to visit the City Museum of St. Louis...
- Click on the thumbnail to expand the image and look carefully in the background. In the front of the museum, one can pick out what looks like a Dali-esque collection of columns, towers, minarets, slides, even a fire engine and (hidden by the columns) a pair of airplanes. All welded and posted to the front of the museum, threaded through by myriad tunnels and platforms.
And it's all climbable. Every bit of it.
It's a gigantic outdoor jungle-gym -- by far the biggest I'd ever seen. I'd *never* seen anything like it, anywhere in the world. Like the famous Wardrobe, it seemed far larger once you were ensconced inside. Far larger once you were squeezing your way through hidden passages and pulling yourself up, down, and around winding, twisting, arcing passages of plastic and steel...
It was like something from a children's fantasy -- "Climb torwards the airplane, then out the roof of the cockpit"...
..."climb up the rope to the fire engine"...
- "take the slide down to the ball pit", right down to the hidden campfire, complete with marshmellow roast.
It was the giant playground to end all playgrounds out of a kid's wildest dream -- or the wildest dreams of kids at heart, like us. There were clearly some passages designed to be accessible only by kids and not most adults -- fortunately, all four of us were of sufficently lanky (and flexible) build to shimmy and clamber through them all.
We rapidly discovered that nothing was accidental out on the MonstroCity -- any opening someone could fit through was meant to be gone through, led to a whole new series of passages, chambers, vistas and platforms. For all it's seeming chaos, the MonstroCity was intricately designed and meticulously planned. Without ever retracing a major passage or revisiting a platform or tower, and with pretty much charging along non-stop, we spent nearly two hours winding our way through, exploring the outdoor MonstroCity.
And then we went *inside* the City Museum...
- By this point in the day we'd already firmly embraced the spirit of the City Museum -- there were no coincidences, no accidents, nothing that was not deliberately placed. Anything that was physically big enough to climb through or looked like it could be climbed up was *meant* to be traversed, would lead somewhere. By this point, we were quite deliberately avoiding the obvious main passages altogether, instead seeking out and diving into into the side tunnels and hidden chambers.
And where the MonstroCity's vast size and scope was transparently visible, the Caves were an entirely different proposition. Unlike the MonstroCity, where you could see ahead through the thicket of tunnels to the next passage or tower or plastform, the Caves kept their secrets within their massive bulk, rising and falling through all the 3-D space a four-story former warehouse a city block on a side could provide.
A spiral stair hidden in the back of a giant statue of a whale gave way to tunnels reminscent of Jeffries Tubes from the ships of Star Trek...
...and then a quick dive down a rabbit hole underneath a cabin porch and up a series of narrow vertical shafts and twisty passages...
...opened up into Khazad-dûm, complete with Endless Stair.
As we weaved our way through the Enchanted Caves, opening up on two-story tall galleries and climbing winding staircases cut into the cavern walls, the Moria references became irresistable. I began humming the fanfare to Howard Shore's A Journey in the Dark. The quotations flew fast and quick:
- The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep.
You know what they awoke in the darkness...
And they call it a mine. A mine!
It’s a four-day journey to the other side. Let us hope that our presence may go unnoticed.
Now there’s an eye opener and no mistake.
Alas, the City Museum closed just as we began to only barely begin to explore the depths of the Enchanted Caves; the last parts of it, in fact, including the Endless Stair and it's equally long spiral slide, we did at a run. More for the next visit. :-)
Afterwards, we picked up Zach (who unfortunately had to spend the day tele-commuting to work) for dinner at Fitz's, a local St. Louis tradition (marvelous ice cream floats and shakes and brew their own root beer); discovered a marvelous Lord of the Rings pinball machine (complete with minature red flaming Balrog!); returned to the apartment to horse around and play games (huzzah for Munchkin: Cuthulu! huzzah for Catan, long-ago gift of deor and malada and littleholly!) and finally, after a long happy day and weekend, bedtime.
In the morning, I reported to NICU and the last of the Cynnabar folk left to go home; most of the Cynnabar folks departed the day earlier, after Crystal Ball's direct end (and that tale to come, huzzah). But it was a wonderful weekend. :-)
- And a year later, further up and further in...