DIY Art Giant Bob Cassilly Died This Week
We received this note yesterday from a Hyperallergic reader: "Bob Cassilly died … His bulldozer tumbled down a rocky hill, flipping over a bunch of times while he was in it. He was a pretty tough guy. He turned a giant shoe factory in St. Louis into The City Museum. A wonderland of potential lawsuit
We received this note yesterday from a Hyperallergic reader:
Bob Cassilly died … His bulldozer tumbled down a rocky hill, flipping over a bunch of times while he was in it. He was a pretty tough guy. He turned a giant shoe factory in St. Louis into The City Museum. A wonderland of potential lawsuits and junk. Made, entirely out of trash. 80,000 square feet. Packed. Impossible to explain. A treasure. Today is a sad day for DIY art.
Those are kids climbing that building … It’s a video of the outside of the building. They don’t even go inside. There are 200 other videos you can watch of the inside. Probably no two alike.
Here’s just a taste of his legacy, courtesy the New York Times:
He created whimsical animal sculptures around the country, including hippopotamuses for children to play on in Riverside Park and Central Park in Manhattan and a giraffe at the Dallas Zoo that is Texas’s tallest sculpture if you count its outstretched tongue. In his native St. Louis he built a children’s paradise of tree houses, caves, slides and odd treasures he found and called it City Museum. It became a leading tourist attraction.
Obituaries and reports of his death have already surfaced online, here are a few:
- “Bob Cassilly, Playscape Creator Fueled by Whimsy, Dies at 61” (New York Times)
- “City Museum Founder Killed in Bulldozer Accident” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
- “Bob Cassilly Died in Bulldozer Accident at ‘Cementland’” (KSDK)
- “Remembering Bob Cassilly’s Cementland: A Photo Tribute” (Riverfront Times)
- “Famed Sculptor Bob Cassilly Killed in Construction Accident” (FOX2 St. Louis)
- his Wikipedia page
And there will be memorial for him tomorrow in St. Louis.
