Philadelphia's Magic Gardens

This guide to Philadelphia's Magic Gardens follows folk artist Isaiah Zagar, who returned to the city in nineteen sixty-seven amid a breakdown and taught himself mosaic as therapy, covering the walls of his wife's South Street shop with broken tile, mirror and bicycle wheels. By the early nineteen nineties he had run out of walls he owned and began tiling two vacant lots next door, land belonging to distant investors who never objected. That went on for over a decade, until the owner in two thousand two set a price on what Zagar had built. Run your hand along the mirror shards and porcelain outside and feel how far one man's therapy spread.