City Museum is a play house museum, consisting largely of repurposed architectural and industrial objects, housed in the former International Shoe building in the Washington Avenue Loft District of St. Louis, Missouri, United States.
Popular among residents and tourists, the museum bills itself as an "eclectic mixture of children's playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel." Visitors are encouraged to touch, climb on, and play in the various exhibits. "Don't touch the art" is never commanded; although safety docents are present on each of the 11 floors.
Opened in 1997, the museum attracted more than 700,000 visitors in 2010.
The City Museum has been named one of the "great public spaces" by the Project for Public Spaces, and has won other local and international awards as a must-see destination. It has been described as "a wild, singular vision of an oddball artistic mind" and compared to the similarly individualistic Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.