Bob Cassilly

Robert James Cassilly Jr. (November 9, 1949 – September 26, 2011) was an American sculptor, entrepreneur, and creative director based in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1997, Cassilly founded the idiosyncratic City Museum, which draws over 700,000 visitors a year and is one of the city's leading tourist attractions.

Early life and education

Cassilly was born in Webster Groves, Missouri, to a homemaker and a building contractor.

While living in St. Louis, Cassilly and Davidson restored over 36 dilapidated Victorian buildings. These restorations led to the construction of six in-fill townhouses, for which he designed the architectural flourishes. He also designed a 12-foot-tall cast stone border fence for Cordage-Nivek's adaptive reuse of the former Dorris Motor Car building (4100 Laclede, 1985). The townhouse project led Cassilly to start making sculptures professionally. In 2002, financial obligations forced Cassilly to begin charging visitors a fee to park at the museum. Cassilly hung a sign in the museum's parking lot reading, "Greedy Bob’s Parking Lot." He designed two turtles for Turtle Park in St. Louis. A giant concrete butterfly, called the Mysterious Monarch, was unveiled in Faust Park outside the Butterfly House, Missouri Botanical Garden in 1997 in Chesterfield, Missouri. His works for the St. Louis Zoo include the Sea Lion Fountains and a 45-foot squid statue. Some members of Cassilly's family contested the results of the investigation and hired an independent doctor, Arthur H. Combs, MD (who at the time held a faculty appointment at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis) to review the evidence. He concluded that Cassilly was beaten to death, but the St. Louis medical examiner dismissed his evidence and stood by the ruling of accidental death.