October 17–24, 1996

city beat

Zagar Zone

In which Isaiah Zagar cuts his hair, Steve Fried pulls weeds and we tell you what's missing from Philadelphia guidebooks.

By Daisy Fried

The three ladies in the kind of handsome coats and hairdos that come with a certain comfortable and handsome feminine maturity are attracted by the arch of tile-words high up on the wall of 724 Mildred St. in Bella Vista: "House Of The Two Writers."

The two writers are Philadelphia magazine writer Stephen Fried and his novelist wife Diane Ayres. Their house, which glitters and gleams of late with fragments of mirrors, ceramic tile and pink-green-blue pastel grout, is being "Isaiahed," as Fried terms it: made into a mosaic mural by local art celeb Isaiah Zagar.

The trio of handsome ladies stand oohing and ahhing in drifts of powdery grout that's sifted down from where Zagar's at work above on some scaffolding.

"Ooh," says a lady. "How much did it cost you toget that done?"

"Ahh," says Fried. "You've got to negotiate that with the artist."

Barcelona has Antonio Gaudi. Los Angeles has the Watts Towers. And Philadelphia has the Isaiah Zagar Mosaics, but you won't yet find them in any guidebook.

Zagar, of course, is the hipster hippie, the faux-or-maybe-vrai-naif folk artist, the original South Streeter, the guy with the skinny beard, the goofy shoes, the spackled clothes. He owns Eyes Gallery, 402 South St., with his wife Julia. And he first worked his mosaic magic decades ago on the Painted Bride Art Center, now clad, as everyone knows, in pink-silver swirls from top to bottom.

Last year Zagar got a $50,000 Pew Fellowship, which he has spent on making more mosaic walls. His stated goal is to recreate, and refer to, in modern folk idiom, the time he says was the height of world art and culture: colonial Philadelphia with its system of little parks. Hence the logo on some of the Zagar walls: Philadelphia is the Center of the Art World. Art is the Center of the Real World.

Whatever. The thing is, they're gorgeous; there are so many of them now, they're reaching critical mass, and people seem more into them now than ever. Maybe that's because of the Pew, an official stamp of approval. Maybe it's because we're all getting a little tired of the strained, self-righteous, easy politics of a lot of recent art, which doesn't make craft its priority.

But maybe it's also because of what happens to a street that gets "Isaiahed," the way Steve Fried's did earlier this year.

Mildred is one of those delicious little streets that tunnel into the blocks near Center City which are inhabited by a mix of old-neighborhood Philadelphians and creative yuppies like Fried and Ayres. People put out barrels of geraniums in the summer and the old ladies try to keep order on the block and everyone clucks their tongues over the graffiti that festers on empty walls. And then if you're lucky, Zagar comes and covers up your graffiti with his pretty lumps and bumps.

The wall down Mildred from Fried's house had been badly graffiti-marked. During the Gulf War, a neighbor painted an American flag on the wall, but that too got tagged by the spray-can vandals. So the neighbor asked Zagar to do his thing, so Zagar came and covered the wall with his bits and pieces in the shape of sparkling neo-Byzantine bodies with mirrored haloes or hats or afros.

"And then, after he did the wall on Mildred Street," says Fried, "I mentioned not very subtly in the magazine piece it would be cool if he'd come and do our house. And one day he came and knocked on the door. He did the bottom part in April. We kept hoping he would come back. About two weeks ago he did."

The House of The Two Writers will be complete by the end of this week. By now, Fried and Zagar know each other well enough to tell the kind of teasing lies or truths or lying truths you tell about somebody you really like just to let them know you like them.

Fried tells how Zagar threw a party for a friend and Zagar got his hair and beard dyed four different colors and then the dye didn't come out as it was supposed to so he had to get his hair all cut off since he was about to begin a commission to "Isaiah," a table for a staid business firm on Rittenhouse Square.

Zagar says he doesn't know what Fried is talking about.

Zagar throws a hand out at the wall and another at Fried and says "This is true old-style patronage. Steve would only let me do his wall if I put his name on it."

To which Fried protests "Isaiah! Give me a break! When I asked you about [an aspect of the wall] you said, 'Steve, don't tell me what to do.'"

Zagar snickers merrily and climbs up another level on the scaffolding. The handsome ladies ooh and ahhh at the wall about:

• masks made by children at a local school in a self-portrait project. The principle decided the heads were "too ethnic," and said "get them out of here." A teacher gave them to Zagar to use for the wall.

• shards of tiles from the Eyes Gallery. "One day Isaiah was busting up these tiles with a hammer," says Fried. "And Julia Zagar came by and said 'Isaiah, we have to sell those!'"

• whole tiles painted with cacti, fish, pineapples, radishes, little naked guys with many arms; blocks of tiles with faces painted on them; vague figures outlined by scraps of mirror. Fried says the consensus on the block is that they're cowboys, because of the shape of their hats; that makes Zagar laugh.

Fried says he and the neighbors shine the mirrors and sweep the leaves from in front of the wall. "This is the kind of neighborhood where the ladies still wash their stoops," Fried says. "They used to look at me, because I wouldn't weed the cracks in the cement. Now I weed, because of the mural. Hey, if the mural gets the next generation of urban dwellers in the mood to clean up their street, I guess that gives the ladies something to be happy about."

The wall up the street, 7 feet by 25 feet, was one thing. The side of the Fried/Ayres house was another.

"I was so scared the neighbors would hate it," says Fried. "This little Italian lady came up and I figured she'd think it was horrible. But she had awe on her face and she said 'This is what should be on the wall at the Italian Market instead of that Frank Rizzo!' And one guy behind me was debating whether to get Isaiah to do his exterior wall and I heard him tell these roofers working on his house he wasn't sure and the roofers were like, 'Are you fucking kidding, the guy's a genius, you're an asshole if you don't let him!'"