Bob Cassilly

Early life

Cassilly was born in Webster Groves, Missouri, to a homemaker and a building contractor. He began skipping school by age 14 to work as an apprentice for a local sculptor, Rudolph Torrini. Cassilly graduated from Vianney High School, then earned a bachelor's degree in art from Fontbonne University in St. Louis.

Career

While at Fontbonne University, Cassilly met and married his first wife, painter and printmaker Cecelia Davidson. Together they restored over 36 dilapidated Victorian buildings, built and ran a restaurant in Lafayette Square. They sold the restaurant, which allowed them to move to Hawaii, where he carved wooden figures. Cassilly reportedly grew tired of Hawaii and returned to his native St. Louis. While earning a master's degree in art at his alma mater, Fontbonne, he met his second wife, sculptor Gail Soliwoda. They remained business partners until their divorce in 2002.

In May 1972, Cassilly was on his first honeymoon. They were visiting St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City when Laszlo Toth attacked Michelangelo's The Pieta. Cassilly was the first to act and subdued Toth.

During the mid-1970s, the restorations done by Cassilly and his then-wife, Cecelia Davidson, led to the construction of six townhouses, for which he designed the architectural flourishes. The project led Cassilly to start making sculptures professionally. He soon became known for his public pieces that depict animals such as turtles and hippos.

In 1993, he and Gail bought a 250,000-square-foot (23,000 m²) complex, which included the International Shoe Building, offices and a 10-story warehouse, for 69 cents per square foot. They renovated the site and opened it in 1997 as the City Museum, helping to spark a renovation boom in downtown St. Louis. The museum includes a shoelace factory, a fire truck, two airplanes, and a Ferris wheel on the roof. The Project for Public Spaces listed the museum among the "Great Public Spaces in the World" in 2005. 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."

Cassilly's other works include hippopotamus statues installed at Hippo Playground in Manhattan's Riverside Park in 1993. In 1997, Cassilly also contributed hippo sculptures to Central Park's Safari Playground near W. 91 Street. 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. Cassilly's giraffe statue, which stands at the entrance to the Dallas Zoo, is the tallest sculpture in Texas at 67½ feet tall. His works for the St. Louis Zoo include the Sea Lion Fountains and a 45-foot squid statue.

In 2000, Cassilly began work on Cementland, a repurposing of a former cement factory on a 54-acre (220,000 m²) site in north St. Louis.

Death

On September 26, 2011, Cassilly died at Cementland. A police investigation found that he died of injuries after the bulldozer he was driving flipped down a hill. But in October 2016, medical expert Dr. Arthur Combs concluded that Cassilly had been beaten to death, and the bulldozer accident staged.

Cassily was survived by his third wife, Melissa Giovanna Zompa, and their two children, Dylan and Robert III; and two children from his second marriage, Daisy and Max.

Commissioned sculptures