City Museum is a surprising museum in St. Louis that showcases the city’s discarded parts. Here you’ll find old school busses, abandoned planes, bank vaults, chimneys and just about anything else you can imagine. Put all that in the 600,000 square-foot abandoned Shoe Company, add genius Bob Cassilly to serve as the mastermind behind everything, and you end up with the world’s largest playhouse, funhouse, and pavilion of surrealist art that is also an architectural marvel. The building is also breathtakingly beautiful, and you can spend days just looking at everything in total awe.

Alternatively, you can crawl through fake caves, quaint cubbyholes, slide down floor chutes that plummet ten stories down the building, drive a school bus that is hanging over the edge of the museum, or climb to the top of a 20-foot-tall metal praying mantis. If your kids have been exceptionally well behaved, rent it out for a truly thrilling birthday party.

Address: City Museum, 750 North 16th Street, St. Louis, Missouri, Phone: 314-231-2489

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