Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens sneaks up on you.
Walking past 1020 South St., you understand that although “garden” might be a misnomer, you’re not sure what else to call the place. While the epicenter of the project is located here, the mosaic murals cover 33 city blocks with multicolored tiles, thousands of mirror shards, bricks, bicycle wheels and arches made of glass bottles the color of sapphires and Heineken. It’s overwhelming — at once obviously broken and yet perfectly assembled. Stand in the Gardens and you become Alice, falling down the rabbit hole in the phantasmagoric world of artist Isaiah Zagar’s creation.
One Friday afternoon in February, Zagar is at a private residence at 627 Kamball St. doing grout work on a mural in the backyard. At first glance he comes off as a cross between Doc from Back to the Future and Allen Ginsberg circa 1969 — he’s got a wild beard, a reflective, rambling way of speaking and a tendency toward constant motion. For a man who is almost 70 years old, Zagar moves with surprising agility. He refuses to sit still for an interview.
“One of the best ways to get to know me,” he says, eyes radiating mischief, “is to be with me when I’m working.”
***
Irwin Zagar, who goes by his Hebrew name Isaiah, was born in Philadelphia in 1939. When his father got a job in Brooklyn, the family moved near Zagar’s maternal grandparents, who owned a candy store in Coney Island. Zagar’s father joined an art-of-the-month club at the Museum of Modern Art, exposing his son to Monet, Renoir and Bruegel. Zagar relives those paintings as he recalls them, the colors and textures clear in his memory.
A last name ending in “Z” stuck Zagar in the back of his second grade classroom and bad eyesight kept him from seeing the front board. To pass the time, he drew all over the blackboard in the back and quickly earned a reputation as the class artist.
“Recognition for what I do has been real important to me,” Zagar acknowledges. “Because otherwise why would I do all these things in the street?”
In 1968 a group of artists in Philadelphia rented the beat-up apartments and storefronts on South Street in an effort to renovate the neighborhood. The state wanted to tear it all down to make way for a road connecting I-95 and I-76. That same year, Zagar and his wife, Julia, came back from Peru — where “Irwin” became “Isaiah” so the locals could pronounce it — after three years together in the Peace Corp.
Returning to Philadelphia, Zagar experienced such severe reverse culture shock that he suffered a nervous breakdown, stayed in a mental institution and started seeing a therapist, whom he still visits on occasion.
“I began to think about how to be an artist without having a career as an artist,” Zagar says. “I thought with a nervous breakdown it was no longer a possibility.”
At this point, Zagar recalled having seen an architectural sculptural project by an untutored artist named Clarence Schmidt. Schmidt’s masterpiece was “House of Mirrors,” a 30-room, seven-story residence on the side of a mountain in Woodstock, NY, made of scavenged items such as window frames, dried starfish, washing machines and shopping carts. Neighbors dismissed the “unsightly menace and hazard,” but Schmidt won praise from the likes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Though the home burned down in 1968, its influence survived.
“I was very, very touched by it,” Zagar pauses. “I didn’t even know if you could consider what he had done art, because it had no parameters.”
Zagar tried mosaics as rehab. “One of the things that led me into a disastrous paranoid schizophrenic attack [was that] I wasn’t focused or present,” he explains. “This kind of work — you have to be very focused on each and every tile. Each of these tiles wants to be seen, whole, beautiful. It wants to be realized.”
He started at the Eyes Gallery, a space he and Julia rented at 402 South St., and the mosaics spread from there. The government’s expressway plan died. The Zagars had a son, Jeremiah. In 1987 Zagar bought the building at 1020 South St., which at the time was just a one-story garage. To get the rest of the space, he squatted on the two adjacent lots.
Reflecting on the unconventional acquisition of his property, Zagar says, “I thought of them as my own even though I didn’t own them. I hid myself there. It was an illusory thing I was doing, but art is very much an illusion.”
He and Julia mortgaged their house and took out a loan so they could afford to acquire the lots legally. The lots cost $300,000, two-thirds of which they scraped together from contributions. They still owe the last $100,000.
Money is not the only challenge. “The ideas, the passion of making art, can die. Or you’re feeling like you no longer have the power. I’ve felt that many times in my life: what do I have to say?”
Asked what he hopes people get out of the Gardens, Zagar replies, “I got something unfathomable [from Schmidt’s piece]. I got a different heartbeat, a change. You know they say when you get scared, your heart begins to pound. When a man sees a beautiful woman, his heart pounds… It can change your heartbeat.”
Plenty of people aren’t sure what the Magic Gardens is, but they’re sure of what it isn’t: art. They yell at Zagar while he works, calling him a brick-hater. As Zagar carefully cements mirror shards and tiles in place, outraged passersby accuse him of destroying the beauty of the city. Petitions to stop him from continuing his art have circulated through the neighborhood, he says.
“I get discouraged a lot,” Zagar admits. “One of the things that an artist constantly goes through is the question: is this really anything worthwhile? Is this even any good? I’ve seen places where there’s shit on the wall.” He stops working for a moment. “That’s violating art, isn’t it? I think it’s that they don’t think of it as different from everything else. You think of these walls as something special.” Isaiah goes back to work, his movements slower, like he’s feeling his age for the first time all day.
Zagar’s studio is above the garage behind the Gardens. A wide staircase — covered, predictably, with tiles and mirrors — leads up to a large, cavernous room. Light pours in from tall windows and bounces off the high white ceiling. There are cardboard boxes everywhere, overflowing with different Zagar-esque items: gloves, crayons, watercolors, tiles. Messages like “Are you a magic gardener?” decorate the walls.
Two weeks after working on Kamball Street, Zagar is here, standing over a wooden table. He adjusts a ceramic tile with a penis painted on it. Different body parts are portrayed on several four-by-four-foot panels — a face on top, “big hips” down below.
“At seventeen,” Zagar explains, “Irwin was crazy for girls. He couldn’t get any, but he was crazy for them. I had very squinty eyes because I was myopic and didn’t want to wear my glasses.”
Usually so comfortable, Zagar is abruptly awkward and shy. Often he verges on incomprehensible. The Irwin of his youth is ordinary and familiar. Later on, Zagar wonders aloud: “I don’t know if this [piece] will make any sense to anybody.” Trying to understand Isaiah is like solving a Rubik’s cube with your fingers taped together. But Irwin is someone you already know from second-period biology, with his scrawny legs in his gym shorts, lonely as only an adolescent boy who hates his body from the inside out can be.
“That’s why my work is filled with all this eschatology. Do you know what that means?” Not waiting for a reply, he pulls a dusty Webster’s dictionary off a shelf. Eschatology: a belief concerning death, the end of the world or the ultimate destiny of humankind.
In Zagar’s left hand is a wooden square, a makeshift palate for a hunk of soft plaster. Methodically, he spreads the plaster on the backs of tiles like peanut butter on a Ritz cracker and places them on his panel-in-progress. Without looking up Zagar mentions his breakdown again.
“Everyone is filled with reasons to break down. I was crazier than a loon. Although mine was because of taking a drug, too… Somebody brought me something to take, and I would take anything then.”
His son, now in his 20s, just completed a documentary about Zagar called In a Dream. It was his wife Julia’s idea, although she couldn’t have known that the drama captured on camera would involve her as much as her husband.
Earlier Zagar had described their marriage as “peaceful, but [with] a certain volatility to it.” He said he’d left her briefly, but “I came running back. I just couldn’t live without Julia.”
Now he reveals, “I was with another woman.” He quickly adds, “I couldn’t even last more than a few days. I realized, my whole body realized it, that this is not gonna work. Watching [In a Dream], I see that part of me that went a little crazy... I was caught.”
Today the familial rift is as mended as rifts ever are — even when you put a puzzle together perfectly, you can still see the lines where the pieces were broken apart — and Zagar is finding other ways to build an extended family. “I thought I could make the whole world my family. In a way, I’ve done that with the Gardens. I walk through and everybody wants to hug me.”
Yet with all this community, he is often alone in this studio, surrounded by self-portraits.
“Sometimes I feel lonely. I think that loneliness is a big part of making art.” He considers this. “Lots of people are alone and not making art. Lots of people are just alone.”
A craving for hot tea propels Zagar to walk the two or so blocks down South Street to his house. The Zagar home is, essentially, the Gardens with a roof. It’s like being inside a spinning, rainbow disco ball. Mosaics cover every surface, wall and ceiling. Climbing the narrow winding staircase, you feel like you’ve been swallowed by a scene from Across the Universe. You swim in Zagar’s imagination as in a trippy, shattered sea.
Between sips of tea, Zagar talks about finally meeting Clarence Schmidt only a few years before his “House of Mirrors” burned down.
Seeing the house, he remembers, “was a physical sensation. [But] it can never be again. It’s lost. A lot of these kinds of places don’t last, because they’re very fragile. This place is very fragile. It’s sad to say that, but it’s true.”
***
In 2004, a decade after Zagar established the hub of Magic Gardens at 1020 South St., he called lawyers and got a 501(c)(3). Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens would be a non-profit organization with Zagar serving as its administrator.
Back on Kamball Street, Zagar muses over his new role. “Now I’m a CEO!” he says, like a child excited by his mastery of the alphabet. “See-Eee-Oh!”
At the end of the day, Zagar drives back to the Gardens and looks through the windshield at his hometown.
“I needed to find my roots. And I did, but they’re all gone now.” Both his parents are dead; his mother spent her last six months at Zagar’s house. It’s a good memory, he says. There is something peaceful in the awareness that things end, that he will one day have to stop spending his days as he has spent them for 45 years.
“There’s no way you can keep doing this forever. It’s arduous, physical work.” He doesn’t sound sad, just honest, but when asked about plans for the future, he doesn’t answer. Instead he swings the car door open, gives a goodbye bear hug and squints to see in the dusk. His blue eyes focus on some space ahead, as if looking at the horizon, which is a fitting place for him to gaze — it’s a spot you always see but never reach.
