Secret Garden
South Street is home to one of the biggest and most distinctive art projects in Philadelphia. You may notice it as you walk along the street –the mosaic mural-adorned buildings, storefronts covered in mirror and tile, and a once empty lot now turned into a glistening urban oasis. Isaiah Zagar’s Magic Gardens, located on South Street between 10th and 11th streets, is a true masterpiece. Tens of thousands of pieces of ceramic, bottles, wheels, and other found objects cover every square inch of the building and the garden to which it is attached. You could spend days in the space and still not see everything Zagar has created.
The gardens are often inhabited by children, students, and anyone curious enough to stop in when they see the massive project from the street. When Zagar isn’t in his studio, which is also open to the public and attached to the garden, he walks about the space and speaks to visitors among the colorful menagerie of words, shapes, wooden carvings, and glass faces.
Although the garden looks as if all the space has been covered, no one knows if it will ever really be complete. “Only I will know when that is. For you who are seeing it now, it is complete and perfect,” Zagar says. He also teaches weekend-long workshops on mosaics in which the participants help create and install a mosaic mural in the neighborhood.
The Magic Garden is a wall-to-wall masterpiece. Thanks to its many supporters, it remains as a permanent testament to the spirit of the neighborhood, where you never know what kind of place you’ll find yourself in or who you may meet, but it’s always interesting and always new. You will also notice Zagar’s smaller murals throughout the neighborhood, undoubtedly in one of the most diverse places in the city.
The actual garden began in 1994, but Zagar has been a part of the Philadelphia art scene and the South Street Renaissance, a movement of folk artists, since 1968. The Renaissance began when a group of entrepreneurs and artists bought run-down store fronts on South Street and turned them into cafes, galleries, and music venues. During the tumultuous Vietnam War era, South Street became a haven for musicians and artists to convene and express their reactions to the war through art. The spirit of that movement lives on today in the Magic Gardens, where the messages of peace and the need for art still stand, as evidenced by one fragment of a wall that reads “Art is the center of the real world.”
