06.20.24
Steve's space in the Lemp Brewery, St. Louis, MO

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Dave Blum is a Cassilly Crew member and cofounder of BLA Studios, Such and Such Farm, and Sk8 Liborious Church.

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Dave Blum: 

[Chewing] I'm trying to stuff this sandwich in my face as quickly as I can. This is from Dressel's Pub in the West End. We used to sell them a bunch of shit from the farm. We don't really work with restaurants anymore. But they have this sandwich called the "Louie," and it's stupid good. My buddy Mike Miller and Derek Rowe made it and came up with it at least 10 years ago. Anyway, it's a good fucking sandwich.

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Daniil:  

Could you share a little bit about what you do generally?

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Dave Blum:  

I do a bunch of shit. I got a farm, Such and Such Farm. Me and a bunch of the other boys at the Museum started a company, BLA Studios. We build weird City Museum type shit all over the place. Just build a bunch of UFOs and slides and climbers and stuff like that. I'm co-founder of Sk8 Liborius and our nonprofit, the Liborius Urban Art Studios. It's a lot smaller now since we had a giant fire just about a year ago on the 23rd. But we're building it back into a big outdoor skate park, me and my buddy Brian. That, and then, you know—dad, husband, all that other good stuff too.

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Daniil:

I think last time we talked you mentioned you had a date with your wife at Cementland?

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Dave Blum:    

Yeah, I took her on our first date there. Bob said it was alright. I wanted to take her on a ride on a tractor there, but the tire was flat; that kind of sucked. Three days before that, there was a big jobsite trailer there and a bunch of other trash, and Bob just had us burn it all. Just shoved it into a big pile with a bulldozer, and we lit it on fire. So there were big globs of molten aluminum that was the siding on the trailer. And so that was my gift to my wife on our first date, this weird glob of melted aluminum. Nothing says "I love you" like melted trash. And there's a Subway restaurant on Riverview and I-270, so we got Subway sandwiches and ate them in the middle of that jetty bridge that sticks out in the Mississippi by Mosenthein Island. So it was a pretty good first date. It worked; she married me and shit.

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Daniil:  

When did you start working on Cementland?

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Dave Blum:  

Oh fuck, um… I started working on the crew with the guys in 2007 or '08, something like that. And then we were all going to Cementland from day one. They had already been out there for years before I started on the crew. Every time the weather was nice, Bob sent us out there. We'd all go out there and do whatever we were working on at the time. It was back and forth between the Museum and Cementland all the time.

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Daniil:

Like seasonal?

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Dave Blum:

Like emotional. Sort of seasonal—it was more just when Bob would go, "We're going to Cementland," and we would just go to Cementland and work on something. And that tended to happen more when the weather was nice, but I have very vivid memories of being there in the middle of winter when the ground is frozen and there's snow on everything. So we were there all the time. Sometimes me and Greg and Bobby and Ricky would get sent out to Cementland to go do something, and Leef and Joe and Mary and Daniel would be at the Museum. We'd get broken up sometimes; we don't all work together all at once. But sometimes we all went out there.

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Daniil:

Do you remember the first time you went on site?

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Dave Blum:  

To Cementland? No, I drank a lot back then. It all kinda blurs together. Me and Rob lived in this crazy apartment in the Art Loft. That was a point in time that we jokingly refer to as the Alcoholocaust, the Alcoholpocalypse. We were all just 25, and we all just worked for Bob, built a bunch of crazy shit, drank and partied and spent all our disposable income on alcohol, drugs, and guns. And it was a pretty good time.

But the first time I was out there, I don't have a vivid memory of like, "Oh man, my first day!" I was just stoked to work on the crew, because I liked the Museum. I went to high school with Max, and I I knew a couple other people in the Museum. And I've worked on construction sites a bunch. I just got back from doing a job in France. I'd been doing stonework in the south of France and had gone to school for metal fabrication, industrial design. So I knew some of the work that I needed to do there. But I was just stoked to have an interesting job that I liked. I liked all the guys too.

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Daniil:

So what did you do on the crew?

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Dave Blum:  

Oh, all sorts of shit. I did a lot of welding. Played whipping boy to Bob a lot. He would yell at me all the time, but he always apologized. He always apologized to me and then sent me to work with Bobby [Heinemann]. He was like, "Oh you can work with Bobby now"—that's how Bob said "I'm sorry," to me at least. As far as stuff at Cementland, we laid cobblestones into castles. We dug them out of dump trucks full of dirt where they got dumped. We dug water lines; we ran power lines. We poured batches of concrete. 

We built this weird conveyor that we would blast Portland cement out of. We found one of the silos just full of cement. Old Portland cement is like Portland, sand, and gravel, and water, essentially. So we found a whole silo full of Portland; I think Bobby found it. We were driving in there to get it, because we just bust a hole on the side of it. We were driving it with a bobcat, just taking scoops of it until we were basically making a tunnel into it. We were like, "Oh, this is dangerous as fuck. It's gonna collapse on us; we're just gonna die in there." So Steve, who works with me and is one of the co-owners of BLA studios now, took a half inch wall tube and welded it to a big piece plate. We'd pack it full of gunpowder. And then we found there's some room in the back of the main building that was just full of old playboys. Like tons. There's a bunch of porn in there. And so we'd rip pages out of the old playboys and pack them in there with gunpowder and push it in there and light it, and then it would explode. It would make this giant explosion, and all that Portland would fall down, and then we would scoop all that up a little safer. Then, eventually, we made a conveyor to get it all out that we just built out of junk. There was an old conveyor, kind of like a cup conveyor system that was there, that we set up to get the Portland out. 

We seeded hillsides and built hillsides. And worked on bringing scrap in and scrapping it. And Bob would get weird stuff from wherever, and we would put it wherever he said. A lot of object relocation engineering that was basically just like, "Stick that shit over there." And then we built stuff too. We built cupolas. And I remember one time, Bob wanted us to build this bridge out of buses. It was Bi-State buses, like two Metro buses, and we'd weld them together to make this bridge. But it didn't really work. At least it didn't work the way we thought it was gonna work. It didn't really work, and Bob's pissed off, and so he had Greg and Rob just smash buses with bulldozers and high lifts for a day. 

It was like a crazy Mad Max post apocalyptic construction wasteland. It was fun. It was a super fun job. Definitely working on the City Museum and Cementland for Bob is the most formative employment experience I've ever had. Definitely changed the trajectory of my entire life.

I'm done with the sandwich, so let's move to something louder, like a crunchy Caesar salad. [Takes out a salad and starts eating.]

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Daniil:

How was the work day organized? Can you walk me through, step by step?

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Dave Blum:  

It was eight till five. We'd take lunch at 11. If you're in the middle of a project, you'd be working on that. But sometimes, it was task to task, day to day. We'd stop and go back to the City Museum, or someone would stay. It wasn't super regimented. It wasn't like you clocked in and clocked out, like you do anywhere else. It wasn't like working in a factory. Usually, I had no idea what I was going to do when I came into work. And the next day, I had no clue. And sometimes it was awesome. And sometimes he'd be like, "Dave!" And I'm like, "Yes, sir!" And he'd be like, "The float has shit on it, go clean it out." I'm like, "Man, all these people have been living and shitting on that thing for years, fuck." And I’d go to do it. And Joe would powerwash the side of the entire fucking building. 

We were placing all these panels on the ceiling one time, on the roof of that huge building. Cutting pieces out of these jetways. Like when you walk onto an airplane, there's that jetway you walk through. When TWA shut down, Bob got a bunch of those. So there's old TWA jetways. We took a bunch of those, and me and Nate, Nasty Nate, we're cutting those things up, picking up a crane, putting them on the top of the building and then knocking out these big concrete pieces. They're falling out, and it was maybe a 100-120 foot drop. And then we would put down the jetway pieces and weld them onto the beams to make a better roof, because the roof of that main side was caving in. That ended up being real sketchy; I almost fell through that roof and died. That was pretty nuts. 

I fell in the one spot where you could fall and not die. It was like a peninsula, this air handler that was sticking out over this giant opening. There was nothing below it, like 120 feet down. And I just happened to fall right on the shipping container area. We were on this spot that was the good panels; we've been working on them for weeks, staging our equipment there. And Kurt came up there to talk to us about what we were working on. I was like, "Oh, these are the good ones. We've been here for weeks. This one's gotta go, this one's gotta go." And I was tapping on them with a sledge hammer. Because that's what we've been doing; it's just all the ones we knew were good. Usually we were tied off in a harness, but not that time. And knocking them out with a sledgehammer, they were just falling; it was a long way down. There's all these pieces of rebar, like three pieces that went through the center of each one. And I was showing Kurt the ones that were bad. "These are good; you can stand here. And this one's gotta go, this one's gotta go." When I hit that one, just tapping it to show him, it went and it took the one I was standing on with it. And I just fell through the floor. On some slow motion shit, like, "Hello darkness, my old friend," you know. Just fucking falling through the floor. And I thought I was gonna die. Because I knew what was below us, that there was nothing there.

But I happened to be on top of a blower that was maybe the size of a table, and so I only fell like 12 feet. But one of those pieces of rebar went through the leg of my pants. It missed my leg, missed all the other stuff there, and we just had to cut it off and pull it through. So it was super dangerous out there. Nobody who worked out there kept all their blood in their body while doing so. It was dangerous. Like fucking Andrew almost cut his fucking hand off. Greg almost fell through a roof. Everybody got beat up a little bit. But uh, you know, it was fun. It was a blast. I had a good time at Cementland. I have very fond memories of it, and the way it all played out. You know, except for one day—there was one real shitty day out there when Bob died; that sucked. But other than that, I have good memories out there.

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Daniil:

What was the decision making process like? Did Bob tell you what to do project to project, or did people come up with their own stuff ever?

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Dave Blum:  

For the most part, it was up to Bob. Bob would come up with projects. But there was a larger grand design that he had for the place in its entirety. For example, Ted, Ron, and Amy would do a lot of larger master planning stuff with Bob, and Kurt would help execute everything. So let's say, this area is going to be a big canoe float or a lake or whatever. There's a lot of steps in building that, like with the concrete pouring and forming it and stuff. And at the time, I wasn't really privy, or didn't care to be privy to the larger master plan. I was just there doing my job and working. And there was 12 or 15 of us; we're all real close, like family. Occasionally, there would be a little more creative freedom, but it was Bob's world. He was the kind of DaVincian genius out there, and we were all working like leafcutter ants, building stuff. There were some projects that I got to have a little creative control in, but none at Cementland. There was some stuff in the City Museum where he was like, "Just make something cool." There was one slide I got to play around with. But it's Bob's world. 

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Daniil:

Did he share his plans with the crew overall?

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Dave Blum:  

Yeah. But it was like, "There's gonna a big canoe float over there." He would be like, "We're gonna build a slide; it looks like a dragon. Here's a drawing I drew on a napkin," or some model made out of clay. I'd be like, "Ah, okay, I'll go get the torches." So there weren't large design meetings. Well, we sat down, a lot of times. But especially after Bob died, a lot of people came to us on the crew, and they were like, "Well, you guys are gonna finish Cementland and the City Museum. You know what Bob was doing." It's like, I don't know that Bob knew what Bob was doing. Bob, he just fucking did shit. Fucking did it. He just executed. It was all very stream of consciousness. So he wasn't afraid to be like, "We built this thing. We spent three months on it. I don't really like it anymore—fucking tear the whole thing out. We built this thing. It's a dragon. I'd rather it be a dog with a dragon head, so I wanna rip its body off and make it whatever the fuck it was." And so it wasn't like a secret design plan. Like the roof at the Museum or Cementland, he had basic ideas. He had models and sketches and drawings, but it just became what it was through doing it. Always have a plan, but always be prepared to deviate from the plan. And we did a lot.

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Daniil:

Were there a lot of things you guys would start that didn't work out?

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Dave Blum:  

"Not work out" isn't really the right term. Nothing “didn't work out.” Like that buses thing didn't really work out. But you try shit, and it doesn't work out sometimes, but you're gonna turn that into something else. Of course there's stuff that doesn't work out, but I don't recall any giant, drastic, insane type failure. There was stuff that we had to change that didn't really work out, like that bus bridge and other things like that. But it's not like there's a manual you consult on how to weld two BiState buses together to build a bridge out of it. You just fucking do it. And you do it as best as you can. And you got a bunch of capable, smart people fucking with it. And you’re gonna get three quarters of the way in sometimes, and you're just like, "Well, that's not gonna work." So yes and no. Failure is important. You learn a lot through failure. 

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‍Daniil:

Can you talk a little bit about the salvaged materials you were using at Cementland?

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Dave Blum:  

All sorts of shit. Guys like Regan, Russ McVicker and Johnny Pattsios would bring all sorts of stuff. We would be moving huge piles of hydraulic bricks, those blue color curbstones, those more reddish colored curbstones. We'd have TWA jetways. I remember Larry Deutsch from HWP Rigging brought two huge turbines from a dam one time. We had all sorts of stuff that we salvaged out of the Lafarge Cement Company. All sorts of gear from that, like these giant pillow block bearings that held the smashers that were the size of this room. These giant limestone tumblers that smash limestone blocks into Portland cement dust. So everything you can imagine, just crazy. Pallets and pallets of Kentucky slate for roofing. Cementland served as a warehouse, storing a bunch of stuff that people now see at the City Museum. We also had a whole bunch of Bob's old molds out there. People would donate stuff all the time. We'd get scrappers in there trying to steal shit. I remember Bob caught these scrappers one time, and he shoved their truck full of scrap from right outside the gates back into Cementland, and crushed it in front of them with his bulldozer, full of all this stuff. It was a crazy place. It was fun.

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Daniil:

Do you know where the brick and stone was coming from?

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Dave Blum:  

A lot of the large limestone, when you see blocks that are about 30 inches deep by six or eight feet long—typically those are curbstones. fI you look at the edge of the sidewalk, it'll be these limestone or granite blocks. And you'll see that gradient line where they stick up. They go quite a way below the street. And there was other quarry block that we would get. Bob would buy it sometimes. He'd go to an auction and buy some big crazy lot. Him and Ricky would go, or with Kurt, and they'd pick something out. Stuff would get donated all the time, because they're like, "Who do we give it to? Give it to the crazy city museum guy; he'll build something weird out of it.” 

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Daniil: 

And the hydraulic brick, people were donating too?

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Dave Blum:  

Hydraulic brick, I'm not really sure. Hydraulic brick goes in and out of value and favor. There's a bunch of companies that made that type of brick. Some of them are stamped hydraulic, others stamped Poston or Egyptian, and there's a bunch of companies that made those set and fired bricks. And they're starting to be a little more valuable, because they're a finite resource. They don't really make bricks like that anymore. And you can build more structural stuff with them, like you could lay streets and have cars drive on them. 

And they just don't make stuff like that anymore, because now we have child labor laws. It's not like the late 18' or early 1900s, when eight year olds packed clay in a mold in a factory for four cents a day. And the countries where they do do that, you're not gonna ship a shipping container full of bricks over. We just have different techniques, different building materials now. Just like they don't do plaster building interiors now. They used to do lath and plaster, and now we have drywall. People don't do that. There's no plaster companies. It's not a lot of marble companies anymore. So hydraulic brick is  a relic of a different time when people had and used different building materials and different building techniques. As far as where Bob got them from, he got stuff from all sorts of places. I would be surprised if someone donated hydraulic brick, but I don't know. There was piles of hydraulic brick out there.

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Daniil:  

Would you guys get scrap metal too? 

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Dave Blum:  

Oh yeah. People would donate stuff or Bob would buy it. We had relationships with scrap yards, and Bob would go with Ricky sometimes, and would cherry pick yard backer metals or wherever. Bob had relationships with people, and we would go in, "I want that pipe. I want that." A lot of the time, you can't find stuff like that; you have to go down to a scrap yard. For example, are you familiar with that grapevine at the City Museum? Those balls that are the grapes are from a ball mill. So a giant tumbler, probably the size of this room, full of those balls. You put stone in there and it smashes them all up. And then you have this rebar that's bent crazy like a bush. If you had to bend rebar like that on purpose, I don't know how many lifetimes it would take you to build that. The only way you get that is by having a dude with a giant magnet or a giant claw pull it out of a big pile of scrap, where bulldozers have been pushing it up against cars and refrigerators for a month or two to get it all tangled in this crazy way. You can even cut it apart with a torch to figure out which piece looks cool there, but hardly people think to make a piece of rebar go like that. Especially some of that stuff in the grapevine: it's one inch diameter rebar. 

So scrap yards are really cool for stuff like that. You can get unique, interesting materials if you have a cool, creative, artistic eye, which Bob most certainly had. And then you can figure out cool stuff to do with it. The tricky part is figuring out cool stuff to do with it. I think a lot of people have ideas, but they don't execute on them. Or they don’t know how to execute on the ideas that they have. But Bob had a way he saw the world, and he went for it. Not a lot of people do that. Takes a lot of balls to do that.

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Daniil:    

I heard that Bob also had a deal with construction companies dumping dirt. Was that before your time?

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DDave Blum:  

It was a bit during my time. But the bulk of the time that I know you're referring to was before my time. In my understanding, it was the cheapest place to dump dirt in the region. It was right before I started working there. I met all those dudes, but the time when it was just dozens of dump trucks a day piling mountains of dirt was before my time. But that is true. And there'd be, with air quotes, "clean fill." Who knows what's in there. So you'll find all sorts of stuff. A lot of stuff got dumped out there. That was a cement factory—it was flat, flat with buildings on it. It's not flat anymore. It was brought in yard by yard. And that wound up being part of the issue with opening it.  

Taking something like that project we did at Cementland and retrofitting it into this amusement park, kind of an outdoor City Museum, but then also getting it compliant for code regulation is hard. There was a point where I was working with Ted, and I was crawling through the sewers. I was trying to locate these manhole covers, because we were trying to get water to get occupancy permits for this one area, like the castles in the back. And we had to show the existing waterways for Lafarge Cement Company. And based on these blueprints that Ted had found, we had to precisely locate this manhole. But Bob put a fucking pyramid on top of it. So what are you gonna do, move like a million cubic yards of dirt? No, I just had a rope tied around my waist and a walkie talkie. I'm talking to Ted, who is who knows how far behind. Walking through waist deep water in these utility canals underneath the surface of the roads of Cementland, trying to find this manhole cover. Looking up with a flashlight, trying to see it. "Yeah, it's right there!" And then I'd have to count my paces back to get an idea about where it is, because we have to show it. 

So when you talk about planning it out, there's a way that you do large development projects, where you have a large master plan, as they call it, that has plumbing, electrical, HVAC, mechanical in there. And you present that to the city or whoever, and then you go in for your initial inspections, and you pour your footings, and then they inspect your footings, and you pour your foundations, and you do your slabs, your electric and your plumbing and all that stuff. We didn't do any of that shit. We just went out there, and we just fucking built it. For years, Bob would do this dance, because Cementland is half in Riverview and half in St. Louis City. So when Riverview Dan, the inspector from Riverview who was not on good terms with Bob, would show up, he'd be like, "I don't know, we're just working on the City side." When the City would show up, "We're just working on the Riverview side." And he would just bounce back and forth to the County line and the City line. We'd work over here, we work over there, and so on. That's why I smile when you're like, "So was there a big plan?" It's like, kind of, but not the way you mean. 

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Daniil:

Just to clarify, the fact that you guys weren't sure where that dirt was coming from was part of the issue with compliance?

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Dave Blum:  

I don't know. I don't know where the dirt was coming from. That's out of my paygrade, before my time. And as far as its role in compliance, I'm not really sure either. I didn't sit down with Bob like, "Bob, how's it going with all your permitting stuff? What's up?" He'd be like, "Shut the fuck up, get the fuck out!" Like,"Bob, you got permits for all this stuff?" I didn't ask, and I also didn't care. I was just stoked to be out there with all my buddies building big crazy stuff, chain smoking Newport cigarettes, burning giant trailers full of stuff and taking this chick I'm trying to date on a tractor ride and taking photos of her. 

So as far as the legality of stuff, I don't really know. That's something that Ted could probably talk to you about, the reality on the ground there. A lot of that stuff that I'm telling you, I'm just regurgitating stories that were told to me about conversations that I wasn't privy to. And I think that's very important for you to include. I know that we would bounce back and forth from Riverview side to that side. That was openly joked about, but as far as what permits we needed for what, I don't fucking know. Where dirt came from? Like, "Excuse me, where's this truck from?" It'd be like, "Tell them to dump it over there. Hurry up!" And I'm like, "Yes sir!" I'm running and waving at the driver, "Over here!" And then he dumps it, and then you get the backhoe and scoop it out. And then Bob is screaming at me from the bulldozer. Like, "Excuse me, driver, where's this dirt from?" "Shut the fuck up, Dave! Get the next one, it's coming!" I don't know.

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Danii:

How big was the crew when you were working on it?

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Dave Blum:  

We gained and lost people throughout times. There's a main crew of the OGs. And then there was kind of a younger new generation of Cementland / City Museum folks. So Kurt, Ricky, Mary, Bobby, Daniel, Me, Rob, Nate... 12 to 14 people, pretty much. But then other people would come in and out. And Bob would send floor staff kids out to come work with us. I think halfway just to break them, just to make them quit or something. I think it was a big thing. I remember, there were a bunch of floor staff kids that came out in the middle of winter. We were trenching something; I don't remember what it was. And the ground was frozen. So we're pickaxing, going through a foot of frozen ground to get to dirt we could actually dig to bury whatever it was we were burying. And it was five degrees outside or something. Greg worked on crew with us for a while. Greg's like a fucking animal. And Greg's just pickaxing this shit, going nuts. This floor staff kid is watching him like, "Wow it's really cold out here." And Greg just stops, and he goes "It's not cold. You're cold." 

So Greg was there for a long time. Bobby, Mary, Kurt, Ricky, Daniel had been there for years. And then me and Joe. Leef came in shortly after I did. Greg was hired right after me. And then other people would come and go. All sorts of randos and other people that have worked for Bob earlier would come in for a little while and be gone again. So it waxed and waned a little bit. These kids that were taking these barges down the Mississippi River. Like homemade barges. They were told by the Army Corps of Engineers, "You are going no further." They got stopped, and they worked with us for a while, these river kids. They had a barge with a skate park on it. They're cool kids. But yeah, crew is kind of a loose term. 12–14 probably at any given time.

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Daniil:

What did the barge kids do for you guys?

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Dave Blum:  

Not really much of anything. They were good kids, a bunch of crust punks. They were traveling down the fucking Mississippi in homemade rafts, in barges, like a bunch of shit lashed together. And my understanding is that they were trying to get down to New Orleans, and they got to those locks and dams on the Mississippi, and the Army Corps of Engineers took one look at their vessel. They had like a three horsepower motor or something. And they were just like, "Fuck no. You go no further, and you'd be fined daily. You have to park your barge over there." 

So they stopped off near Cementland, and they wound up being there. They’d be spreading grass seed or digging a hole. Bob would be like, "These kids are here. Dave, these guys will help you spread grass seed." Bob paid them like $6 an hour or whatever. I don't know what they were making. So they would come and work. But none of those dudes, that I can recall, came through and were there longer than a month or two. I can't recall anything too substantial. Like, "Oh yeah, that cool thing over there, the barge kids built out." Nothing like that. He just threw them into the mix. A lot of people got thrown into the mix.

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Daniil:

Were people trying to sneak in just to hang out?

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Dave Blum:  

At that time, not really. After it all shut down, people started to break in all the time. People tell me, "Oh we’re breaking into Cementland." I'm like, "You're fucking dying there." If you go past the caution tape at the City Museum, you're gonna find a room with some unfinished exhibit, some slide that's not quite done, a bunch of tools and cigarette buttstock down on the ground, people's lunch wrappers. At  Cementland, if you go where you're not supposed to, you'll find a 30 foot pit with 10 feet of water, and no one hears you fucking die in there. It's super dangerous. All of us almost died there; Bob did die there. 

But like I was saying, I fell through the roof of that building in the one area where I would die if I had been three feet away. I would not be talking to you right now. Or there is one area where I could have fell, where it was maybe only 80 feet. So if I survived, I'd probably wish I didn't. You'd be in a wheelchair, shitting in a bag for the rest of your life. So I always hear about people going into Cementland and wandering around. Have at it man, sure. It's your life, risk it however you want. I mean, God knows I have. But like, that place is fucked. 

And we maintenanced it, and took care of it, and fixed things that were broken, and knew it inside and out, and crawled through the tunnels underneath it. And we knew that place; we were there all the time. And we were there with other people who had blueprints. And there's a bunch of places like those silos where we found the Portland that I mentioned earlier. You could get on top of them, crawl down into them, and it would seem hard on the top cause the Portland locks itself in. Until you step in the wrong spot, and you're gonna fucking disappear into a silo of Portland that's 100 feet tall and 90 feet across. So it's super dangerous. 

And these hills I'll see kids on Instagram sledding on. They're like, "Oh yeah, we're at Cementland on those big hills!" And there's snow on them, and they're sledding. I just think about climbing up those big hills to seed and grabbing pieces of rebar sticking up out of the ground, so I can pull myself. I don't think anybody ever pulled that piece of rebar out. It's this maybe 30 to 20 foot long stick that's curled up in the ground, and it's under this much snow now. And you could hit it with your knee while you're sledding. It's not a finished thing. 

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Liz:  

A lot of people describe Cementland as something that was about to be finished right before Bob's death. But the way you describe it is more of an endless construction site. Did you ever see it as something that was going to be finished?

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Dave Blum:  

Define "finished." What's "finished" mean? 

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Liz:  

Open to the public.

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Dave Blum:  

To me, that's not "finished." To me, "opened" and "finished" are different things. Is the City Museum finished? I'm still gonna build a bunch of shit. We're building a ton of stuff there. There was an area that we were preparing to open. Or "open" is even a weird word. Like with Sk8 Liborius, we were open all the time. We had tons of people come there with giant raves to fund the whole thing. But we didn't have occupancy permits. And in order to get those, you need HVAC, plumbing, electric, sprinklers, or whatever you need to be open. So as far as having people come there, for the public—who knows, man. Who knows what it takes to get the city to say, "We'll sign off on you allowing the general public here." And like I said, at City Museum, you put caution tape up. But what do you do in Cementland, when you have 12 foot fences with concertina wire on them. All you need is an old rug and a ladder, and you're getting over the concertina wire. 

So "finished" is a weird word. I'm not sure it's the word to accurately describe what it would be, but there was an area that you can see as a little more finished. Or polished, I guess. Over by where those castles out of cobblestones are built. Around the time that Bob died, we were getting that area to a place where maybe we could bring people in to see that one spot. But like, it was 52 acres. So that's an acre of it, maybe two acres, maybe five in that area. There's lakes and canoe floats and all sorts of stuff we were building. It was Bob's magnum opus. So "finished," you know, what's that mean? 

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Liz:  

I heard towards the end, a lot of investors that Bob had originally had pulled out of it. Do you think that's in part why?

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Dave Blum:  

I wasn't privy to whose money was going where, and who pulled out. Or if people were investors and then they pulled out. I'm not really sure who told you that, or what the deal with that is. What I do know is, my favorite Bob quote was, "One can ascertain the success of a project based upon the resistance of the bureaucracy." If you have an idea, and people in charge push back against it, it usually means it's a good idea. Because people don't like new interesting shit. 

There's one guy that I know was a benefactor to Bob. He was involved up until long after his death too. I can't really speak on that. But it never appeared that there was stuff we weren't doing because some giant amount of money just dried up. Bob made it happen.

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Daniil:

What's your favorite thing you guys built out there?

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Dave Blum:  

My personal favorite? That's a good question, actually. We built this cool gazebo thing, where we took this giant hopper that was part of Lafarge Cement factory and flipped it. It used to be a funnel and we flipped it upside down, and took these piers and put them underneath, and built these crazy long stretching walkways that led to it. It was off further by where the lake was heading off towards that big smokestack. That was pretty cool. That was a fun one.

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Daniil:

Did you guys ever get people from the neighborhood trying to come up to the site and talk to you? From Chain of Rocks or Riverview?

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Dave Blum:  

What do you mean people from the neighborhood? 

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Daniil:

People living around Cementland?

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Dave Blum:  

Sort of, not really. Muddy Mike lived in that neighborhood, and him and Bob are friends. So Mike would be around, but it wasn't open. It wasn't like, "Come on in." People would certainly show up. But it was 50% "May I help you?" and 50% "What the fuck are you doing here?" People would show up, but it wasn't like moms in a Dodge Caravan showing up with a group of kids. It was a giant construction wasteland. I'm sure occasionally people from the neighborhood came there, but it wasn't a regular thing that happened.

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Daniil:

Tony Rocca was telling us that after Bob's death, they were letting Riverview Police Department do shooting range stuff there.

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Dave Blum:  

Yeah.

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Daniil:

Did they ever do that before too?

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Dave Blum:  

No, definitely not while Bob was there, no way. Bob had a healthy disdain for bureaucrats and authority figures. I heard about that afterwards, that they'd come in there and shoot guns in that big silo. No, if people with badges and white vehicles with numbers written on them came in when we were there, and Bob was there, it was not a time for rejoicing. It was a time for hiding shit we weren't supposed to be doing. But after he died, it was a different vibe, a different story.

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Daniil:

Were there contacts you guys had on the North Side specifically that you were getting materials from or anything? Or any crew guys who lived on the North Side?

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Dave Blum:  

Materials came from everywhere. There was this one dude who had a missing leg that I think lived nearby that worked with us for a little while. Till one day, I think him and Mary were gonna fucking kill each other, and he got fired. But like I said, crew people would come and go. There was a core group of people that had been working for Bob for decades. And then there were the next gen folks, which were Leef and Greg and me and Joe and Rob. But everyone just got hired any and all way. Anybody got a chance. People would show up all the time, and everybody had a chance to carry a bucket. Bob would put you to work; there was stuff to do. 

My interview was—I got brought up to the roof. We were finishing off the caves, and building that big seven story spiral slide. And I knew some people who knew Mary and brought me up there. And Bob felt my hands for calluses. Like, "You got rough hands. Alright." That was like his way of telling, "Alright, you've done some work." And I had pictures of shit I built, like he gave a fuck. I could have just showed up, you know? He probably would've given me a shot if I showed up with no shoes on and a crack pipe hanging out of my mouth. Because we gotta get that pile of heavy shift from here to over there.

Rob Dixon, whom I lived with for a long time, passed away in 2012, not long after Bob. Rob told me when he got hired, his mom knew Mark von Drasek, who did a lot of painting at Cementland. He was on the crew working for Bob for years and years and years, long before I got there. And Mark's an awesome dude, Mark's a hell of a guy. Great dude. Married to Stephanie, who runs the gift shop at the museum. And so Martha, Rob's mom, knew Mark, and dressed Rob up in some little shoes and little shirt to go ask Mr. Cassilly for a job. And they were shooting gunite down those caves in the City Museum. 

If you're not familiar with gunite, it's concrete. But shotcrete is wet concrete. Concrete dumps into a pump truck, and then you have a big air compressor on this pump truck, and it shoots like a fire hose out of it. Whereas gunite is this smaller machine. You put powdered concrete into it, and it mixes with water at the nozzle. So you can control how much water it is, and that's how you get a lot of those textures. But because it's dry, there's rebound everywhere. You're just in this massive dust cloud, all up in your eyes. It's really dirty work, and you must have respirators on, and you gotta hold the hose or it will surge on you and stuff. 

The way the story was told to me, and this is before my time also, everyone was down there shooting gunite in the caves. And Rob came in his little Docker pants and little shoes that Martha put him in, and was like, "I'm here for a ..." [Imitates loud pouring noise.] Bob's just pouring gunite; he got a respirator on. He's like, "I'm here… I know Mark von Drasek. I'm here for a job." Bob goes, "You're here for a job?" And Rob's like, "Yeah, yeah, for a job." And he's like, "Do you know how to work a shovel?" And Rob's like, "Yeah." And he's like, "You're hired, start shoveling all this shit up."

And it was just like that with a bunch of people. Everyone got a shot. And Rob, he worked there for a decade after that. And some people lasted a week, but their intro into it was all the same. For me, he felt my hands for calluses and asked me if I knew how to weld. And I said yes. And he just had me weld these two seams together and had Mary look at my welds. And he was like,  "Yeah, that's okay. Alright, show up tomorrow with your boots on." And I was there for years after that. And saw a lot of the people show up the exact same way. Like the dude with a peg leg showed up because he could weld, and after a month him and Mary are fucking screaming at each other. And they were like, "Alright, Pirate Joe, get the fuck out of here." That's kind of how it went.

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Daniil:

You mentioned Muddy Mike. Was he helping with the canoe stuff?

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Dave Blum:  

I don't know, but I would assume. Mike and Bob were friends. At his funeral, Mike built a dugout canoe and brought Bob's ashes down. They were friends, and Mike lived not not far from there. And Bob had a house on Riverview that the crew helped build. It was not far from there. And so I am not sure if Mike played a role in these canoe float designs, but maybe. Him and Bob are sitting around talking and Mike being like, "You know what'd be cool." And Bob like, "Ah, that'd be cool." I could see that happening. But I don't specifically know of design meetings where Muddy Mike and Bob intricately planned the layout of the canoes. But him and Bob were good friends, and they all had a big love for the river. And Cementland was right around the river. Mosenthein Island was right across from Cementland. So people would camp over there. 

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Daniil:

Would you guys hang out on the river much?

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Dave Blum:  

I camped at Cementland once or twice. I think Rob and some dudes took canoes out to Mosenthein Island once or twice. I don't think I ever did. But we'd go party out there. Me and Rob lived in the Art Loft, which was right next to the City Museum. So we had keys, and we would go in the City Museum and fuck around at night. It was a much different vibe there when Bob was around, and we would do whatever we wanted. We'd work in the shop and build stuff at night, working on our own projects. We went there and we played paintball, we played airsoft, and we would take dates there. It's a weird first date: I take you to this weird wasteland I work at. But as far as camping on the river, I don’t particularly associate it with Cementland.

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Daniil:  

Were you guys ever concerned about the cement dust?

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Dave Blum:  

Oh, like silicosis? Yeah, see, that gets in your lungs with the asbestos. The asbestos and the silicosis, they fight in your lungs, and they just cancel each other out. 

But no, kinda. We knew it was a thing. We wore respirators. But there was dust on everything. There was like a six inch layer of dust on every single surface in that place. If you'd look up and there was a piece of conduit going across the ceiling, it would have a mohawk of dust on top of it. So we were certainly aware of it. And depending on what we were doing, we'd wear masks. But there were all sorts of crazy hazards there, and cement dust was certainly one of them. And we were probably not as concerned about it as we should have been. But if I knew I was going to be getting in a bobcat with no windows in it and scooping Portland out of a giant silo, I definitely wore a nice respirator and shaved the night before so I could get a good seal. But if I was getting screamed at that we really had to get this done today, and I didn't have my respirator on, I got it done. Do what you gotta do. 

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Daniil:

But no  lasting effects? 

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Dave Blum:  

I don't know. Not dead yet. So as far as I know, I'm okay. I got in a car accident and had to get a chest X-ray years ago. It's hard to pinpoint it to Cementland. But for anyone who does that work, they are like, "Oh, we can tell you do construction work." Because they see little bits of metal and dust and shit in your lungs, when they do an MRI on your chest. But like, is that from Cementland? Or any of the other shit? I don't know. As far as I know, I don't have any horrible bodily damage from working there that I'm aware of. But ask me in 30 years. We'll see if something pops up.

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Daniil:

How would you describe the idea of Cementland to somebody who's never heard of it?

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Dave Blum:  

What it was like to me? At the time, I was a kid. I was 25 or something, so it was just me and all my buddies building giant, crazy art for this DaVincian madman in this giant post-apocalyptic Mad Max wasteland. But looking at it now, I think what Bob was doing was really beautiful. There's this age of American manufacturing that most people nowadays, particularly people who are now in their 20s, don't have a recollection of, because it ended long before they were born. Where America was this titan of industry. 

You know, in the 60s, that was the largest cement factory in the world. And now it's like this abandoned crumbling thing, but there's a real beauty in that sort of thing. In these giant monolithic structures, and these giant geometric Euclidean forms. Taking that and really looking at it through an artistic eye. Like this is a smokestack, but it's also just a beautiful tapered cylinder. Its proportions are tall and graceful. And that was the thing that I thought was really epic and interesting about the way Bob looked at the world, and the way he interacted with it. Rick Erwin told me, after he died, all these people showed up to give their applications. They were like, “Bob died, so I guess the position is open.” Oh, you're here for the DaVincian genius position? Cool. We'll put your application in the stack. We'll call you. 

So to me, Cementland and a lot of what I was doing at Sk8 Liborius and a lot of other projects I've done since are these beautiful juxtapositions of unlike things. And you get it in St. Louis really drastically, but you see it all across the Rust Belt. Where you have really drastic and fast urban decay, almost like Pompeii when the volcano erupted. Where you'll have this grand ballroom with velvet seats, with gold leafing on the ceiling and Greco-Roman nude plaster inlays. And it's been abandoned for 30 years, and there's trees growing out of the balcony, and a caving in roof, and the velvet drapes are sitting on the stage. There's something almost beautifully tragic about that. Because in that time, with those titans of industry I'm talking about, things were just built differently. The way construction was done, the way the world worked, the way people did stuff—things were built with a lot more permanence. Quality was really important. Whereas now, things are made to be broken. You gotta go buy a new one, and they just crank them out. 

Cementland, had it been completed, would have been like the City Museum. There's a lot of that in the City Museum too. But Cementland would have been like a City Museum on steroids. Where you take these large, amazing pieces of old machinery and these huge silos and these giant smokestacks, and view them through an artistic eye. Like, what do they look like? Where it is almost like a piece of sculpture. And then, how do you engage them so that they are engaging the people who are viewing them? What new purpose can you give them? What new aesthetic can you incorporate them into? Looking back at it at 41 as opposed to 25, I think that's how I view Cementland. And to me, that's the tragic part about it, that there's not a lot of that type of art. Adaptive reuse is really, really hard, because of the occupancy stuff you're talking about. Building stuff to new occupancy codes is hard. It's hard to take something old and bring it to a new modern standard, and bring people into it to safely engage with it. But if you can pull it off, you can build these really engaging and incredible spaces that are unlike anything else that's out there. Because they don't build anything like that. And Cementland and the City Museum are a lot of that.  

People talk to me all the time about Meow Wolf. Yeah, I like Meow Wolf, but to me Meow Wolf is like alright. It's aight. It's cool. Like it's cool, but to me, Meow Wolf and a lot of these other very Instagram ready amusement places, they are fake, but they look real. Whereas Cementland and City Museum are real, but they look fake. And what I mean by that is, they feel like a Disney hotel. Like if you go stay in one of those resort hotels, they'll look like a big Grand Lodge, like these huge oak timbers and stuff. But if you actually got up there on a balcony and leaned over and knocked on one of them, it's fiberglass. It's not a giant oak beam; it just looks like a giant oak beam when you stare at it from 50 feet down in the lobby, looking up at the ceiling. 

But if you go to the City Museum parking lot, that's a real fucking castle built out of stone. And we built it with cranes, carved curbstones and made it like that. It's a giant castle made out of cobblestones. Those are real turrets that we set and poured and built. And a lot of that stuff, it looks fake. It looks like it's a prop that somebody made out of fiberglass, but it's the real deal. And there's not a lot of stuff like that anymore. Because there's a skill gap of people who do that work, or want to do that work. And there's also just the situation for being able to do it. But back in the day when they did Cementland, in the 60s and prior to that, people built lots of stuff like that. There was a lot of real interesting, hardcore construction. But the world is different now. 

Like the St. Liborius Church, for example. Back in the day, in the late 18' to early 1900s, you had marble shops all over the place. Today if you were like, "I need a full size crucifix out of marble," where the fuck do you get that from? But back in the day, you could get plaster, hydraulic brick, all that type of stuff. And to build a church like that, you had this massive funding mechanism too. Back in the day, Catholics notoriously had huge families. Who do you know with six kids now? Anybody got six kids? That was real common in the 60s, 50s, 40s. And North St. Louis, Baden, and where Cementland is, and Old North where the church was—that was one of the wealthiest, most affluent areas in St. Louis for a huge point of time. St. Louis, at that point, was bigger than Chicago. In the 1850s, 1860s, early 1900s, until the railroad went to Chicago. The Germans up there were one of the most wealthy and affluent communities. They owned the hydraulic brick, they owned the shoe making, the beer, all the big industries. 40% of the people in Beverly Hills give five or ten percent of their income to one organization. Like, what can you build with that? Those types of funding mechanisms just don't exist anymore. There's no plaster workers anymore, because now we have drywall. There aren't any crazy stonemasons, because now there's giant concrete batch plants. There's not these huge blacksmiths that make all this crazy ornamental stuff, because there's nobody to pay for it. So the places where you have that type of stuff, to me, you have to reuse them and make something else interesting out of them. Because if you don't save them, they're just going to be gone. Because they don't make them like they used to. 

Places that do have that type of stuff are precious to me, because they are not just a relic of a different time. They are a relic of a different mentality on how we build the world around us. And what is quality? What does that mean? I'm gonna build this thing, and it's going to be around. My great grandchildren are going to see this thing that great grandpa made, and that's not a thing anymore. Nobody's posting on Instagram being like, "I'm gonna put this post with this witty caption, and my great grandkids are gonna see this. And they're gonna think how clever grandma was." Our values are different now. But at the time, Cementland was the biggest cement plant in the entire world. And the concrete that was made there built incredible shit all over the place. And there's something really amazing and beautiful about that. There's something amazing and beautiful about giving that factory a second life and taking those structures and giving them a new purpose again, instead of just letting them crumble into the ground. 

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Daniil:  

That sounds almost like historical preservation. What do you think is the difference between the National Building Art Center’s and Bob Cassilly's approach to working with St. Louis architectural history?

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Dave Blum:  

I think the difference between Bob and Larry is that Bob would've used all that stuff. They have a warehouse over there. Not knocking preserving that stuff. What National Building Arts does is incredible. And it's important. That warehouse there looks like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, all those crates and stuff. But if Larry went to Bob and was like, "Bob you can comb through all this stuff I've got. Take anything you want, build whatever you want with it." He'd have done exactly that. It wouldn't be in crates. It would've been reassembled, and there'd be huge, giant old store arches out of terracotta that you'd walk in and go to stuff. And there'd be gargoyles on fucking everything. He would have used that stuff and displayed it and put it everywhere. It'd be like Bruce Gerrie's collection in Architecture Hall. Bruce has been collecting that stuff for years and years and years. 

So I think that's the difference between historic preservation and adaptive reuse. Bob did a lot of adaptive reuse, and I think National Building Arts is all about adaptive reuse too. And we had a lot of shit stored at Cementland, but the mentality difference was that Bob stored it there until we got around to doing something with it. And if he had an idea pop in his head drinking coffee Tuesday morning, you best believe those crates are getting cracked open. And we're going to be setting terracotta blocks that day or building some weird shit with whatever he thinks would look cool up there. Bob would use that stuff, and it'd be actively used all the time. 

And I might be wrong, but to my knowledge, at the National Building Art Center they archive and collect that stuff. And it's not freely given out to construction companies all over the place, so that lots of people in the public can use these materials to be able to have them out there in the world. That was Bob’s shtick. And there's nothing wrong with both of those two approaches, but you asked what the difference is. And I think that's the difference. Cataloging and organizing, like museum archiving all that historic stuff, that's awesome too. That's really important too, because you do damage a lot of that stuff when you put it out there. And it's not replaceable. That's the only one of those gargoyles or whatever it is, but I think it's just a difference in mentality on using this stuff.

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Liz:  

We actually talked to somebody that lives in Riverview, very close to Cementland.

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Dave Blum:  

I bet they had stuff to say.

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Liz:  

Well, she said that Bob and some of the crew members had gone to a couple of town hall meetings and hosted a town hall meeting for them. Were you ever part of that?

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Dave Blum:  

I was just a worker bee. I was not a "go to town hall." You go to a town hall meeting for a reason. You go there because we're going to be doing this thing. And we want public support or need signatures on a petition for a permit or whatever. And that's the tip of the spear. We were more the end of the spear, the working end of the handle. After all that stuff was done, and they were allowed or not allowed to build whatever they want, then I would be one of the guys that came in and built it. 

But as far as town hall meetings, I wouldn't have been a part of that. And I wouldn't be privy to know what the people around Cementland in Riverview and Northside over there thought about what Bob was doing there. I've heard there were some meetings they went to, that I knew Bob had gone to. That he had been in hot water with various city officials for all sorts of shit, for all sorts of years, for all sorts of reasons. And I knew that there had been issues at Cementland too. So I put two and two together. Like alright, I heard Bob got in trouble for X, Y, and Z. So if he's gone today at a meeting with people with titles in a boardroom, it's probably got something to do with that. There was certainly nothing for me to say at a meeting like that. Like, "What do you think, Dave?" "I don't know, man. I just shovel, bro."

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Daniil:

Is there anything you want to say about Cementland that we haven't asked about?

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Dave Blum:  

I don't know. I wish Bob wouldn't have died. And we could have pulled it all off. It would have been one of a kind. It was a stars aligned type of project, where you have that cement factory that's available in that vicinity, in this city, with this crazy artist who has this crazy crew of all these crazy guys, and has a funding mechanism, and people around him to actually pay, and the artistic eye that loves reusing old stuff. To take a property like that and to have the vision of what to do with it. And the ability to execute it; that's the other thing that it takes to do projects like that. Bob was not our boss; Bob was our leader. A boss says, "Go do this." A leader says, "Follow me." And Bob was out there on a fucking bulldozer at Cementland every day. And was shoveling concrete with flip flops on. He was a badass. And that's the other thing with Cementland: dudes like that, they don't make them like they used to. They broke the mold when they made that dude.

So I'm very grateful that I got to work out there and spend time out there. And the guys on the crew, a bunch of those guys were groomsmen at my wedding. We're all really, really close. Working at Cementland and the City Museum was... You never realize the good old days when you're in them. You just look at them in retrospect. And I think that was it. That time when I was living at the Art Loft next to the City Museum, working there every day and at Cementland. I think that chunk of five-six-seven years might be the good old days. It was definitely the most formative job experience I've had in my entire life, and it drastically shaped everything I would go to do after that.

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