Philly: Magic Gardens

I'm not sure how I heard about Philly's Magic Gardens, but all I knew was that it was an area of town filled with mosaics—and that's all I needed to know to want to check it out on our recent visit. We subsequently discovered that while Isaiah Zagar's mosaics are scattered around the city on walls and down alley ways, you need tickets to see the actual Magic Gardens site. It was already sold out for the day by the time we made it to South Street on Saturday (weighed down with cheesesteaks), but we came back early Sunday and got in right away.

Isaiah Zagar began doing mosaic work in the area when he moved to Philly in the 60s. In 1994 he started to work on the vacant lot next to his studio, but the lot was almost sold and the installation dismantled in 2002. Unwilling to lose Zagar's work, the community rallied and after a two-year legal battle the newly titled "Magic Gardens" was incorporated as a non-profit organization.

It's always nice to hear stories like this when they have a positive outcome and I'm so glad that the community recognized the value of Zagar's work and continues to support him—in addition to the Magic Gardens, his mosaics can be found on more than 200 public walls.

 In his creations, Zagar uses mostly found objects—bicycle wheels, glass bottles, doll pieces and mirrors—which he mixes with handpainted tiles and concrete (I have a feeling he'd LOVE Dead Horse Bay). The effect is so much more than just the sum of its parts. The mosaics are interesting to view up close and become another thing entirely when you step back to take in the whole. Curling lines of paint meet jagged mirror edges, meet a bicycle wheel window next to a bit of china and bottles that create a stained-glass effect when organized in a grid and viewed from the bottom up.

The Magic Gardens is pretty small, but there is so much packed into a relatively small space that you could spend hours investigating every corner. As much as I'm glad that we got to see the Magic Gardens, I think the real magic of Zagar's work is stumbling upon it in the wild. It's such a delight to turn a corner into what you expect to be another standard alleyway (Philly is FULL of alleys, by the way) only to encounter an otherwise-ordinary wall covered in a colorful, glittering mosaic.