City Museum is housed in a sprawling, 10-story, 600,000-square-foot former shoe warehouse. A school bus dangles from the building’s roof. The ultimate jungle gym extends from the windows.

To assemble our first annual list of the World’s 50 Coolest Places, TIME for Kids sought input from trusted experts—kids.

Bob Cassilly’s City Museum at St. Louis is Alice-in-Wonderland, down-the-rabbit-hole surreal, going against the logical patterns and enforced pauses that define the ordered grid of a city.

The sound of children playing is the first thing you hear as you approach the gates, painting the air with the joy of play. But it’s misleading: The grown-ups who belong to them (and the ones who don’t) are at play, too. They traverse cage-like ladders to get to airplanes atop metal structures and meander across walkways and ramps built four stories in the air.

This is City Museum in downtown St. Louis, where anarchy is – sometimes quite literally – in the air.

Here, the rules that govern the city and its inhabitants are stripped away. The layout and structure itself is as if Dalí and Gaudí dropped acid in a salvage yard and miraculously managed to create a structure. There is only one directional sign at the front entrance, and the staffers at the ticket counter will tell you quite firmly that there are no maps.

If you gave Dr. Seuss and M.C. Escher free reign over an old shoe factory and told them to build the world’s craziest jungle gym, you’d get the City Museum in St. Louis Missouri.

This isn’t your typical museum. Very little is “for display only,” in fact touching is highly encouraged. The environment you interact with itself is the museum. You climb, crawl, scoot, slide, and ride all the exhibits.

It’s something you may not have ever noticed: a hippo sitting high atop Washington Avenue! But Emily Dittmer did, and she wonders about it every time she walks by.

City Museum is a museum, consisting largely of repurposed architectural and industrial objects, housed in the former International Shoe building in the Washington Avenue Loft District of St. Louis, Missouri. Popular among residents and tourists, the museum bills itself as an “eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel.” Visitors are encouraged to feel, touch, climb on, and play in the various exhibits. The museum attracted over 300,000 visitors in 1999 and over 600,000 in 2007. It has been named one of the “great public spaces” by the Project for Public Spaces, and has won other local and international awards as a must-see destination.

Opened in 1998, City Museum consists largely of repurposed architectural and industrial objects and is housed in the former International Shoe building in the Washington Avenue Loft District of St. Louis, Missouri, United States. City Museum was founded by artist Bob Cassilly who unfortunately passed in 2011. The museum is open seven days a week and admission is $10-$12 depending on time of entry. You can find complete visitor information on their website and Facebook page.