11.18.2024
Bill Christman's home in Skinker DeBaliviere neighborhood of St. Louis, MO

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Bill Christman is Bob Cassilly's collaborator and the artist behind Joe's Cafe and Beatnik Bob's at City Museum.

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Daniil:

Could you tell us a little bit about Cementland and your involvement with that project?

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Bill Christman:

Bob and I were connected since we met at Fontbonne College back in the '70s, but we weren't drinking buddies or anything like that. But when he was getting ready to do City Museum, he reached out to me through a friend, Tim Tucker. He and Gail came over, and they saw what I was doing here, and he was enthused because you had to sneak through a fence to get into my place. Bob loved doing what you weren't supposed to do, like sneaking into places. I don't think I had Joe's Cafe then. I was just living here and making stuff out in this yard.

From there on, we went to work together on City Museum, and I had a museum in there called the Museum of Mirth, Mystery and Mayhem, which is still there. And another part of that was called Beatnik Bob's Cafe. I grew up in the era of beatniks, and I was very determined to make something that would be a public touchstone for people in the modern era who probably never heard of beatniks. 

And then when Bob launched into Cementland, it was very exciting to me. Everything that Bob did had to be the biggest thing. He wouldn't accept anything unless it was the biggest. That's just the way he was. He was like a kid: if there were two plates of dessert, he would take the big one. And all of a sudden, he has the world's largest cement factory.

And he spoke to me about it in ways that were different from how he spoke to his crew and to the press, because we had common interests. A lot of it was history. And we had other interests, like handwriting analysis and certain quasi-occult things and obscure history. So he told me, which I thought was very interesting, that this thing was like a morality play. This cement plant built the suburbs of World War II and the interstate highways, all of which we thought was shit. The suburbs and the interstates were what changed America from is pre-World War II days to what, to me, is modern America, which I don't have much interest in or appreciation for. And Bob didn't either. He liked old, historic and mysterious places, and things that didn't have shopping malls.

He said that the cement from this plant would go up and down the rivers to build a lot of Middle America: the new subdivisions, the new interstate highways and everything like that. And he thought now it was in ruin. So that was very poetic to him, that the thing that built all this is now a ruin itself. He said it triggered in him this reminiscence of how civilizations rise and fall.

Ancient Egypt was a massive construction project that has almost never been equaled, and it's now in ruins. Next came the Greeks, and the Greek temples are all in ruins. Next came the Roman Empire, which dominated the world for at least 500 years, and now it's all in ruins. He was fascinated by the rises and falls, and he felt that this was a continuation of a civilization, America, that was now in decline. To him, he was living in a historical site. And it's also right across the river from an ancient historical New World civilization: the mound builders, the Cahokians.

And this is another thing about bigness to Bob: he built a mound that was five feet taller than the Monks Mound. And he was really pleased about it. He goes, "Oh, you gotta come up and see; I've now got the tallest mound in America." I would say, "Bob, you're just like a little kid." So the next thing that he started building in there was replicas of all these civilizations. There was a Mayan ball court, there was a Chinese pagoda, there was a medieval castle, and there were pyramids. So he was making this little vignette, which he called a morality play: the pride of humanity is always to make these things. And then they eventually fail, and they fall into decline. So he felt that what he was doing was really a poetic, epic thing. That he was taking this phenomenon of America's decline and making a sculpture that included the other things, which I thought was incredibly wise and inspired.

He would keep feeding the press these stories that he was making another amusement thing. But he said, "That's bullshit. I'm never going to open this to the public. I've already got a museum that brings me all the money I can use, and I got 250 employees and lawsuits and headaches. I don't need any more of that shit." He said, "This is going to be my own little playground." And he also told me that he was planning to give each of the people who work for him, his main crew of 6–7–8 people, a piece of that land up there to build their own house on. And it would become an experimental community of sculptors living in an abandoned cement factory, which was becoming crazier by the minute. I don't know that anybody else was told about this idea of letting sculptors live there, but that would've kept the thing always growing and changing.

And then, when he was really moving into the latter stages, sadly he was found dead. He was right at the point where he had created all these low spots, where you could flood the place, and you would be able to ride a canoe or a boat through all these buildings. It was going to be pretty fantastic. And the public would've been dying to get in there and explore it, which they did in the end no matter what.

He had just completed this giant three foot diameter pipe that pumped water from the Mississippi. His crew could do anything. Anything that was ever done, they could figure out how it was done. Kurt Knickmeyer had said they had that pump all ready to go, and they were ready to flood the low spots of Cementland. And he also built a lake up at a 100 feet. So there was going to be this cascading water, and then all these abandoned factory buildings that you could canoe through. No one had ever had a situation or an opportunity like Bob had. And his imagination just kept firing, like a kid who just discovered an abandoned house and gets to have it for free and make it into his fort.

Somehow Bob tricked the crew into believing they could do anything. And they did, and they didn't know what they didn't know. And so they'd look at stuff and say, "Yeah, we'll figure it out." And I still hold all those Bob’s crew people in the greatest respect. There wasn't anything they wouldn't figure out a way to do, and they still will. So it is my fervent hope that somebody steps in here. If I won the Illinois lottery, I would buy it, and I would fund all of Bob's crew and say, "Have at it. Finish it, make it whatever you think Bob's ideas and your ideas would dictate and just turn into something mind boggling." 

And Bob could salvage anything that could be moved. His dad was a contractor and built houses. So when Bob was a little boy in Webster Groves, his dad was building houses within a couple of blocks of where they lived. He'd see his dad there with heavy construction equipment, bulldozers. And so from his early days, he was seeing people doing gigantic things with gigantic machinery. He said his dad was a really nice guy, and Bob always said he should have been a teacher. He said he didn't really have the competitive drive to be a businessman. And it weighed him down to have to be not just an architect and a builder, but also to sell and to collect money, all that stuff that business requires.

And he said that when he was a kid, they were always building forts in their backyard. And they had a creek which bordered their yard, which is still there. Bob was the ringleader of all the boys in the neighborhood, and they would excavate like eight feet down and put plywood boards over the roof, and you could walk out under the creek. He said his dad never ever got mad at him. They'd leave his dad's tools out in the rain, and they'd all get rusty. He goes, "My dad never scolded us. He would say, 'What you kids are doing is more important than getting the tools rusty.'" Which is pretty gentle, pretty encouraging. 

His dad was an artist too. I have a sketchbook of his dad's figure drawings. He would take classes in figure drawing, because an architect in that era was still getting a classical training of painting, sculpture, as well as engineering. Bob's dad came from that era of architecture.

And then Bob, of course, was an apprentice with Rudy Torrini when he was, I think, in eighth grade. And that never happens anymore, where a guy who was a classically trained sculptor trains another kid to be a classically trained sculptor. So Bob was born in the right place at the right time, and all the things in his life just fit like pieces in a puzzle. And I feel terrible that he got taken out of the game so early, because what he would be doing today... I think he's been dead for at least 12 years. And God only knows what would be the state of Cementland if it was still going on.

And the other thing that I feel is important to put into words is that the plan to turn Cementland into a giant gravel parking lot is bullshit. To take someone's great sculptural creation and turn it into a fucking gravel parking lot is barbarian. I predict that the amount of money that piece of 35 acres sold for is not that much. I've been told $350,000. And Bob's crew, the Roccas specifically, got out of the bidding at about $300,000; they couldn't come up with more. But $350,000 is nothing, really. If you had to rebuild what's there, it would cost you millions and millions.

St. Louis is a city with low self-esteem. We think we want to be New York or something, and we're not. We're just a bunch of Midwestern people, and everybody wants to be East Coast or West Coast, where the credibility and the high art is. But I think St. Louis, largely because of Bob, is going to finally go, "We are what we are." We make shit out of junk, and we are always tearing everything down, so we harvest free stuff and we make new stuff. That's really, I think, the ethos of St. Louis sculptors.

And that's what I'm trying to do in my three vacant lots. These buildings were torn down in the '70s. When Pruitt Igoe was demolished, they moved people into these buildings, which didn't work because these people were poor and had never owned property. They were in government housing, so they didn't know how to keep these buildings fixed and maintained. And as a result, they became so dilapidated that they couldn't be salvaged. They tore them down. That's why I got this big chunk of open land next to me. And it was also the dump site for the World's Fair of 1904. All the plaster staff ornament, which is a mixture of plaster, concrete, horse hair and other things, all got dumped. And if you dig in these yards here, you'll find World's Fair ornament. I've got a small collection of that stuff, and I'm trying to make my own little thing—small potatoes compared to Bob. He would take on almost 50 acres. So my scale is much smaller, and I'm trying to make this into a memorial for St. Louis sculptors that recycled stuff from a dying city. Hopefully, I might be halfway there.

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Daniil:

And you have a project on the Delmar Loop right now too?

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Bill Christman:

I'm moving out of there. Originally, it was going to be an exhibit about aliens, and that sort of got transferred down to City Museum. Then, I decided to have a place where outsider artists could show their work. I know a lot of artists who I think are really great, but they are untrained. That gets back to that low self-esteem of St. Louis. These people do stuff that I think is delightful. So I had a show there for five of these artists that I knew.

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Liz:

I know some of the artists. I know Joe and Tim Maddox.

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Bill Christman:

Yeah. Tim had the window, pretty much. You are talking about the sign painters, right?

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Liz:

Yeah.

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Bill Christman:

That was going to be our next exhibit. This is interesting to me, because I was a sign painter, and I painted theatrical scenery. My first shop was in the U City loop. And all of a sudden in 1984, the Gerber Signmaker 4-B computer came out. This computer plotter would cut the letters out, and you'd peel away the background, and then that was your sign. And the advertising in the National Sign Magazine was so cold-blooded. It said, "Imagine having an employee that is never late for work, never has to go to a relative's funeral, never has a hangover and will work all night for the cost of electricity. Meet the Gerber Signmaker 4-B." So in '84, the computer came into the sign painting business and started taking it over. I did not want to make signs with the computer. I think it tainted me. 

But now in St. Louis, we have all these really great young sign painters. Where did they come from, and how did they learn it? There's at least half a dozen sign painters in St. Louis who are better than I ever was. And that's all I wanted to be, a great sign painter. My trade was eclipsed by the sign making computers, but now these guys can do better signs faster and cheaper. It's almost like undoing the John Henry versus the steel-driving machine. The computer could now be knocked out of the picture, in St. Louis at least and maybe parts of the Third World, where there are these incredibly talented sign painters. And they're faster and better than computers, and their work is inspiring to me. I say hooray for all these new young St. Louis sign painters.

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Daniil:

Were you working on Cementland as part of the crew and contributing your sculptural work?

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Bill Christman:

I was not physically working up there. But I had an open invitation to come up there. Bob was very proud of what he was doing, and our connection was on a different level. And I was older than Bob, which gave me a little bit of an advantage, in a strange way. Bob always referred to me and Dave Blum as a couple of U City intellectual eggheads. But he respected it, even though I wasn't a big rough and tumble guy who could do bulldozers and stuff like that.

Bob was an inspiration to me, and my life changed radically when I started connecting with Bob at City Museum. I'm very grateful, and I'm also sad that he was taken out of the picture. It really is a great loss. But he inspired all kinds of people. I used to think, "Well, these little kids who are going to City Museum are going to see stuff that you're not going to see anywhere else. And they're going to start getting ideas like, 'Hey, we could do this.'" Little kids are fearless. Kids were climbing and sliding and having to help each other get up on things with ropes. Bob would say, "At least they're not sitting on their fat asses watching video games,” which he despised. And I agree that today, the digital world has just taken over, and these kids should be out building forts, exploring creeks, getting in boats, and all that kind of stuff.

The world's in shit shape, if I may say so, from my perspective. Because I grew up in the golden age of World War II prosperity, and then we had almost 20 years where the world was in ruins from World War II. And you come from Russia; you've probably seen some stuff that is not too beautiful. Our addiction to oil made us very vulnerable, because most of our oil was coming from a part of the world where they really are not that crazy about us to begin with. And we realized that our golden age was over, and I think Bob did too. What he was doing there had another level that I've tried to describe. And he was not able to communicate or did not want to communicate those subtle layers of a poetic morality play, as he once called it.

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Daniil:

I remember seeing an interview where he talks about this morality play idea. And it seemed like there was also an aspect of nature versus industry to it too. Can you speak to that?

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Bill Christman:

Oh yeah. I think there's a real potent tale there. When Bob got that property, it was so toxic, and it just had whatever the shit they used in that industry, solvents and things like that, which were probably not taken away from the site and were still there. And at one time, Bob lived in Cementland in an RV with his wife and kid, I think. And he said, "No birds would fly over Cementland." It's 35 acres, a couple square blocks of the city. And after about the fifth year, he said, "The birds are coming back. They will fly over, and they'll come in here." That was a big validation of what he was doing. He goes, "Nature has returned here." And he built these things with water that was free of the contaminant. And he planted thousands of trees, because he had to put trees on these big mounds to keep the soil from washing out. And after five years, all these trees were now starting to mature. And he had somehow healed the site of all the toxic shit from the cement factory. And he took a lot of pride in that. It was like he had transformed something into what was the good, right thing.

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Daniil:

To you, what is that pre- mass cement production American life that you feel has been lost?

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Bill Christman:

That's a big question. I probably look more to the past than I do to the future. I came around in that era when we had the depression in the '30s, and then World War II in the '40s. So for two decades, America was locked into a bad situation. So as a kid, I saw things that were still from the '20s, where people were delivering blocks of ice and coal to your house. And horse drawn carts were still around when I was a kid. It was before television. The largest amount of people in St. Louis would go down by streetcar to the department stores downtown. And they had these beautiful Christmas windows. Crews of a dozen people would work for 12 months to make these spectacular window displays, and the figures in the windows would be animated. It was just crazy. And you've probably never seen anything like that. It was a different world, and kinder and gentler maybe.

And now, I don't know what's going to happen. Certainly the nuclear age puts us all in a little bit of discomfort that crazy individuals would destroy the world. I mean, that was never possible prior to World War II. So looking back upon the world when it was more innocent and gentle was very appealing to me. And now people say, "Oh, we're all going to go on spaceships with Elon Musk and go live on some asteroid." I go, "Have at it. I wish you'd all go sooner rather than later." And of course, it was only two billion people versus eight billion today. If we don't get a handle on that, then in one generation, you're quadrupled. And if you quadruple eight billion, you got 32 billion people. That's not going to work. But I really don't have any credentials to speak. I am sentimental and nostalgic, and I've got kids and grandkids, and I think about what it's going to be. I wish it was just easier.

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Daniil:

Do you see a tension at Cementland between Bob’s fascination with the material culture of mass production there and this longing for the pre- mass production world

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Bill Christman:

He was an opportunist. In other words, what was there, he would use. He didn't want to obliterate and start over. And that's where he was a genius, in my book. While he was tearing stuff down, he would take that and reuse it right away. He's very ingenious. He was basically saying, "I'm going to use this to my advantage. I'm going to take whatever I find of what ruined this experiment here, but I'm going to reuse it in my own fascinating way."

He's always been compared to Antoni Gaudí of Barcelona. He never used anything that was straight or plumb or had right angles, and everything was organic. And he used to say he was like a burrowing insect. He would just burrow, and if the ground was softer over here, he'd go there. For efficiency, he was dictated to go where it was easiest to go. In other words, when you come up against something that you can't move, then you move around it. And that move around, it creates a path. His sense of design was completely his own. I don't know of anybody that works in the same way he did. He was able to change course at any moment. 

I remember at City Museum, sometimes he would get the secretaries and the people who worked in the office, if they weren't busy, and he'd say, "Tomorrow, come to work in your blue jeans, because you're going to be digging a hole underneath the building." And the people who worked there would go, "Hey, that's fun. We'll do it." He was a great leader. There'd be all these walls that we'd have to tear down, and he'd get 20 people from every part of the museum: the people who were the janitors and the office staff and the people who were selling tickets. We would all get together and run and hit the wall with 20 people to knock it over, which was fun. It was like destruction as a pleasant pastime. He knew how to have fun. And that's, I think, why people really enjoyed working for him. Because you never knew what the hell to expect. And he didn't know what to expect. 

And he was almost cursed with this inability to sit still and do nothing. He was just driven. After a whole day of working at City Museum, he would stay up all night and work on stuff that needed his hands on it, much more detail oriented. He was a very remarkable and unusual person in that he needed to work at that pace to distract himself. Everybody's got their demons. I think in the movie I just saw that Mike Gualdoni did, Bob said he had to deal with his depression, and the way he would overcome his depression was to get a project and just start working at it a hundred percent. And I think he knew himself very well, because anybody can be taken out of commission with moods, and he just said, "Well, I gotta work twice as hard because this other condition is damaging." And he would just go towards his ability to work.

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Liz:

I feel like a lot of people respected his persistence because he wouldn't take no for an answer from anybody, including figures of authority and the city and the police. Can you speak to that a little bit?

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Bill Christman:

I am leery because those people might come across these words, but he inspired me. I was not as good at it as he was though. I've had my ass kicked a few times. 

He didn't respect bureaucrats because of what they did. He was not going to let them run his life. For example, up on the top floor of City Museum, he took out all the windows and then moved the walls back 20 feet, so that there was this giant open area. It's like a big porch on three sides of the building. And all of a sudden, the city calls him up and says, "You can't do that. That's a historic building. You can't take the windows out." And he goes, "Well, it's too late. The windows are out and they're gone. And I sold them to somebody in Nebraska. It's done. What are you going to do?" So he found out their bark was worse than their bite, and he just kept plowing ahead. I don't think too many people could get away with it the way Bob did. But he also got sued and had a lot of insurance to protect him from some of the consequences. He had a lot of lawsuits. 

He encouraged a lot of people to be bold. And I think it's good for a society to have bold thinking people taking bold actions. Otherwise, we can be led by the nose. I just don't think that's the way to have a society.

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Daniil:

How do you feel about folks trespassing into Cementland now?

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Bill Christman:

I don't really know. I've seen a guy who made a photography exhibit of Cementland, and I didn't think it was very interesting. It was more about his photography than it was about Cementland. He just picked things that made nice black and white photographs.

If Bob was a kid today, he would be trespassing up there, because something that big and that interesting and that dangerous is very alluring. So I don't think Bob would really be offended by it. But I think he would be most honored if they could get it out of the hands of that trucking company and finish it. I don't know where the benefactors would come from, but they would be reckless kinds of people with a love of art. They gotta be out there somewhere. I'm not one of them, because I don't have the money and don't buy lottery tickets.

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Daniil:

Could you speak a little bit more on those historical and occult interests you guys had in common?

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Bill Christman:

I'd say esoteric rather than occult, because occult has a little bit of a darkness to it. It was just non-scientific areas that are unprovable, like astrology. I am not saying this was the essence of what made us tick, but Bob was a Scorpio, and I was a Pisces, which is at the other end of the spectrum, a very mutable sign. And I've always gotten along incredibly well with Scorpios, cause I'm so opposite, and opposites do attract. We used to talk about things like that. I'm not saying there's any validity to it, but it's worth noting whether you believe it or not. When he died, I was offered the chance to go through some of his books. And it was all these strange facets of ancient history, obscure history, and things like handwriting analysis. It really validated the fact that we had weird interests that overlapped each other.

And we both started building forts when we were kids. I was in a neighborhood that was being torn down in Clayton. The Black people had this neighborhood in Clayton, and when I was about 10 years old, my buddy and I knew some of these families, and I lived right on the cross street. And we see this Black family we knew leaving their house. And we said, "What's the deal?" They said, "They're going to tear our house down." And we said, "Can we have the key to it?" So they gave us the key to their house. So for seven or eight months, we had a house to start this club in, called The Smoking Asses. We were interested in cigarettes and smoking. So we had four–five 10-year-old kids, and we had our own house, and we had brought furniture into it. We built cannons that shot BBs. We were just up to the mischief that kids would be interested in. So that was, I think, where Bob and I really connected. We were similar in age, and we did the same kind of reckless stuff that kids would do back in the '50s. It was a nice connection.

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Daniil:

There is such a unique and great architectural salvage movement in St. Louis, and it seems like part of the reason it became possible was because of the urban planning policy in St. Louis and the displacement of Black and poor folks. Do any particular considerations or difficulties come up for you when you work with the built environment haunted by that legacy?

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Bill Christman:

I think that's a good question. I think that artists in general are outliers in society. Especially in the Midwest, if you're an artist, you're really almost suspicious to the general public. And my own belief is that artists are given a special pass. You have chosen a way in life that's not easy, and because of that you get a couple of extra perks in your program. In other words, you're not going to make much money, but what you do is going to have a spiritual component to it, potentially. If you are doing something to make the world better and kinder and gentler and more humane, that's like a trump card in your hand. There is a quote from The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell, who was a scholar of world mythology: "When you are on the right path in life, unseen forces will come to your aid." And I think it's true.

And the bad juju that comes from all these buildings and neighborhoods that were screwed by institutional racism—I would say artists are exempted from that. We didn't cause those things to happen, and most of the artists I know are actively engaged in trying to make better racial relations, be open to the changes in society and stuff like that. Most of the people I consider bigoted, small-minded people are not artists. They're more likely to be on a golf course or in a shopping mall. Maybe I'm kind of arrogant, and God forgive me.

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