The city Museum of St. Louis is not a museum in the traditional sense of the word and it has almost nothing to do with cities in general or St. Louis in specific. What it is is a huge junkyard play-house. When you first enter it the building looks like the home of an eccentric millionaire over run with children. As you explore further it seems like its so big it must belong to billionaire because it is much too big and they can’t simply be eccentric, they must be insane to have welded a plane onto a bus onto a metal structure outside of their roof.

Then you slide through the shark tank.

Can you get hurt? Of course you can! The city museum is like a huge junk playground and you can hurt yourself here in the same way you might hurt yourself climbing the monkey bars. Except instead of climbing the monkey bars you will be scaling the outside of a tube that goes into some kind of whale den made out of beautiful mosaic tile.

While I was the City Museum of St. Louis I asked one of the many friendly people who worked there if they had ever been sued and she said “All the time.” Much of the cost of admission pays for their liability insurance. Who would insure such a strange place I don’t know, but thank goodness they do. Because what makes the city museum strange is also what makes it fun.

Between Chicago and St. Louis there are probably a thousand interesting pieces of junk. Abandoned cars in dirt lots and old railroad tracks that haven’t been used for generations can create a strange wonderland for the adventurous mind. Flea markets, junk yards and rummage sales hold thousands ...