I was born and raised in North County, and like any St. Louis kid the city museum was one of my favorite places. The hodgepodge nature of the place with this mess of passages and odd spaces was paradise for my undiagnosed ass.

I had heard rumors of this half finish city museum 2.0 in North County for years. It’s sort of common folklore in St. Louis, along with Bob Casily’s suspicious death. But I didn’t make the connection between him being flattened by a caterpillar and the unfinished construction of cementland till I talked to some city museum employees. As I heard more about cementland the more compelled I became to visit. I went for the first time in June 2022 and immediately that childhood awe returned. The whole park was overgrown with green adding to its vast impenetrability. Each new building we encountered provided a different unique challenge. With each we were rewarded with new tags and graffiti, bizarre industrial architecture and beautiful vistas of the park, the Mississippi River Valley and Downtown. We only got to see part of the cementland before sunset, but I was determined to return. I came back in October. The park had been scalped, every bush and tree was gone and it was obvious the park was being prepped for something. The disappearance of that vast impenetrability did lessen the majesty of the place, but it did make it significantly more accessible. This time I was set on exploring every inch. We climbed rotted wooden stairs and abandoned hvac units to the top of the warehouse and crawled into the dark echoey bowels of the grain silos. We weren’t alone that day either, dirt bikes tore through the park and other groups circulated as we did. Occasionally we would call to each other from the respective rooftops we’d occupied. The drama around the Casily family is really interesting, but It's sad to see what’s been done to Bob's works in recent years. I’ve been told that the city museum has been disneylandified, and that much of the magic is gone. I’m not sure what the current state of cementland is, but I can’t imagine it’s positive. I love that y’all are archiving memories of this mystical place. So much of the history of this City has been bulldozed, papered over and forgotten. This place deserves to be remembered. I don’t think we can forget Bob’s other projects. Rootwad park is another one of my favorite places in STL. Despite it being small, it’s an enigmatic example of the industrial surrealism Casily is known for.