ST. LOUIS _ The hippos, St. Louis natives who had a storied career in New York City, are home for good.
They arrived at the City Museum inside a 16-foot box truck late recently, a dozen in all, a little worse for wear.
"Didn't hear a peep out of them," quipped Ricky Fortner, who drove the 950-mile journey to St. Louis after picking up the hippos in New York.
"They look hungry," joked spokesman Richard Callow.
Children visiting a playground on the western edge of Central Park in New York City had climbed over, around and even inside the hippos since artist and City Museum founder Bob Cassilly installed them there in 1997.
"It's one of the most popular playgrounds in the park because of the hippos. Everybody knows the hippo playground," said Marie Warsh, the historian for the Central Park Conservancy.
The hippos had cracked and crumbled a bit over the years, and a water feature inside the mouth of one had quit working. But they were popular hippos. The conservancy didn't want to get rid of them, or send them off to the proverbial south of the Sahara.
The group is updating several playgrounds in the park, including Safari Playground _ the hippo playground's formal name. They hired a 3D scanning firm called Direct Dimensions to scan the hippos, and from there they had fiberglass hippo replicas made.
Warsh called the City Museum and offered to donate the old hippos back, not thinking they'd say yes.
"Of course we wanted them back," museum director Rick Erwin said. "It's awesome."
Erwin was in college the year the hippos were made. He keeps a baby hippo statue in his office.
Technically, it's only half a statue, but it sits on the floor, as if it's submerged in water. (Hippopotamus means "river horse," and they like to hang out in water to stay cool.) The baby hippo once wallowed in City Museum's Toddler Town, and after Cassilly died in 2011, Erwin feared somebody would steal it.
Who wouldn't want it? It's irresistibly cute. Erwin understands the appeal and says visitors ask about Cassilly's hippo sculptures often. They're ubiquitous, as are his turtles, frogs and serpents.
But it's the hippos that have taken Manhattan.
Kurt Knickmeyer, a sculptor for the museum, was a pattern and mold maker for Cassilly when he helped make the hippos in the 1990s.
They first made a family of life-sized hippos to be installed in another New York City park, Riverside Park. (They still stand, and wallow, inside the formally named Hippo Playground. They're in better shape than the Central Park hippos, though the people at the conservancy aren't sure why.)
To make the hippos, they coated plaster with a light layer of shellac to seal the dust, then put a layer of oil-based clay on top of that, Knickmeyer explained.
Cassilly then got pieces of elephant hide from a friend at Schwarz Studio Taxidermy. They pressed the pieces of hide into the clay to create the texture of hippo skin.
They made rubber molds and cast them in pieces. They could create only a certain number of hippos from each mold, and Knickmeyer believes the hippo molds were destroyed in a fire in 2016 at Cementland, Cassilly's unfinished outdoor playground project along Riverview Drive. It's where Cassilly died in a bulldozer accident.
"So many of us worked for Bob the majority of our lives; we have lots of sentimental memories associated with those things," Knickmeyer said.
In 1994, Cassilly also made a family of hippos for Busch Gardens theme park in Tampa, Fla. The hippos are still in the park today and are still very popular with children, a spokeswoman said.
St. Louis has its own hippo history. One can be found in a water feature on the roof of the City Museum. The St. Louis Zoo's Emerson Children's Zoo is home to a wide-mouthed Cassilly hippo, made in 1986.
The same year he and his crew made the Central Park hippos, Cassilly installed a hippo on the roof of the International Shoe Co. building, peeking over the edge. Knickmeyer surmises that hippo was a reject for coloring reasons.
The building is now being converted into a hotel, and the hippo was removed about six months ago during construction. The hippo can't return to its previous perch looking over the edge for code reasons, developer Tim Dixon said. But they do plan to incorporate the hippo and a manatee statue that once stood in the lobby into a rooftop pool, perhaps covering them in a tile mosaic.
New City School in University City, where Cassilly's children attended, is home to four hippos. They sit on the school's playground for its younger children. Recently, one larger hippo was accidentally damaged by a landscaping vehicle. A piece of plywood now patches a hole in the hippo's posterior. Knickmeyer thinks he can use one of the Central Park hippos to make a mold to repair the rear.
As for Safari Playground in Central Park, it will probably reopen in December with the new hippos, new water features, new hills for children to climb up and roll down and new tree houses for them to hide in.
The hippo family from New York (or pod, or herd, or dale or bloat, as a group of hippos is called) consists of eight adult hippos, one with its mouth wide open, and four babies.
They looked a lot better than workers imagined.
"For the amount of time they've been up there, and for the abuse they've taken, I think they look great," said Knickmeyer, who helped unload the hippos along with a throng of other workers. The group included Steven Alvarez, who helped install them more than two decades ago in Central Park.
At City Museum, the babies were easily carried up the stairs. The adults had to take a freight elevator.
Maybe they'll make their permanent home at Toddler Town, which was revamped this year, or on the rooftop, where they could join a giant praying mantis, the single hippo bathing in a water feature and a few other creatures.
"The orcas we carried up there," Erwin said, "Those were a nightmare."
Once the hippos are on the mend, they'll resume their new life, welcoming children and children at heart to St. Louis.
