International Shoe Company Annex

A ten-story factory and warehouse of buff brick over a reinforced concrete frame, fourteen bays long on 15th Street and eight on Delmar. Slender secondary piers split each bay into thirds, giving the block a strong vertical rhythm, and stepped Art Deco caps finish the piers and end bays. INTERNATIONAL runs down the corner at 15th and Delmar, and INTERNATIONAL SHOE CO. is spelled out in raised letters above the loading docks. The corner entrance at 15th and Lucas, numbered 701, sits in a stepped limestone frame topped by a relief of two standing figures flanking a great bird with spread wings. In the doorway mullions stand sculptures by Bob Cassilly, signed and dated 1994, of women in braided headdresses balancing globes on their heads. The roof and grounds are crowded with City Museum additions: a Ferris wheel, a school bus hanging over the parapet, a white dome crowned by a giant praying mantis, and the welded-steel MonstroCity climber with two airplane fuselages.

Built in 1930–31 as a factory annex to the Roberts, Johnson and Rand Shoe Company Building on Washington Avenue, by then the headquarters of the International Shoe Company. James Black Masonry and Contracting Co. was the contractor; no architect is recorded. An enclosed ten-story concrete bridge over Lucas Avenue joins the two buildings. Shoes moved through spiral chutes to the loading docks. Bob and Gail Cassilly bought the mostly empty building in 1993, and City Museum opened in it on October 25, 1997. The outdoor MonstroCity climber was added in 2002, and the rooftop Ferris wheel in 2006. The Shoe Shafts inside the museum grew out of the old chutes from the shoe company's distribution system.