Isaiah Zagar spent decades covering a stretch of South Street with mosaic — covering building facades, outdoor courtyards, and indoor galleries with an intricate web of mirrors, tiles, bicycle wheels, bottles, and found objects. The result is Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, a half-block labyrinth that is simultaneously a folk art masterpiece, an outsider art landmark, and one of the most genuinely strange and wonderful places in the city.
The outdoor sections are free to walk past and impossible to stop staring at; the indoor galleries require a ticket and are worth it. Zagar has spent fifty years covering nearly the entire South Philadelphia neighborhood with murals, and a walk outward from South Street reveals fragments of his vision on walls throughout the area. The Magic Gardens are the concentrated heart of that project — a place that rewards slow looking and keeps revealing new details the longer you stand in it.