Rainbow-like Randyland: North Side’s garden of quirky delights
Randy Gilson greets visitors from the Pittsburgh area and Detroit.
The side of Randy Gilson’s North Side home
Gargoyles overlook Gilson's garden.
A fence like no other along Arch Street welcomes visitors to Randyland.
A stylized map of the North Side, rainbow-like arches, street signs and vintage advertisements adorn Randy Gilson's Jacksonia Street property.
A collection of decorative doors stands against Randy Gilson's studio.
Mural along Jacksonia Street, near Arch, in the North Side's historic Mexican War Streets neighborhood.
Pittsburgh’s North Side, home of so many venues, certainly attracts a spate of visitors. For the sports enthusiast, there are games at Heinz Field and PNC Park. Those with kids and grandkids may gravitate toward the Children’s Museum and the Carnegie Science Center. Bird lovers flock to the National Aviary.
Someone who has an interest in art can gaze at the world’s largest museum devoted to a single artist, Andy Warhol. Want to experience the avant-garde? Roll over to the Mattress Factory, a museum on Jacksonia Street in the historic Mexican War Streets neighborhood near West Park.
While the Mattress Factory is a destination, no one should plan to go there without heading toward a funkier feast for the eyes that exists just a few blocks away on Jacksonia Street, at 1501 Arch.
You can’t miss it, and the two places complement each other.
Randy Gilson’s business card reads “Randyland Project,” and he bills himself as an artist/gardener/street artist.
He could add “explosion of color” to the list, but it would be redundant. Randyland reminds me of eye candy (with all deference to the copyrighted name of a children’s board game). Looking around Randyland, you could swear you landed in a Willy Wonka-esque environment, but slightly crazier.
Anyone can wander around Randyland at just about any time of day, but on the Saturday afternoon our little group was there, a vehicle pulled up and Randy Gilson himself emerged.
“Home sweet home on the North Side” is how he described his abode recently to people from this area and Detroit as birds trilled background music. He told us that two hourglass-shaped “sister houses” used to stand on the site, which he said he acquired in 1996 for $10,000. “It’s kind of a spiritual retreat,” he mused.
The winsome Randy, 56, in warm weather wears paint-spattered T-shirts reminiscent of the works of Jackson Pollock. When the occasion calls for something more formal, he’s prepared to don a dark dress suit sporting splashes of orange and yellow.
This whimsical urban theme park of a homestead boasts murals, flowers, shrubs, gargoyles, a tabletop crammed with mannequins’ heads, pergolas strung with multicolored patio lights, almost phantasmagoric images on a series of terra-cotta pipes, a collection of painted doors and, in mid-air, suspended metal chairs. A red suit of armor cradling a shield-like tray-sized metal flower with a silk posey garland stands sentinel beside a painted pink and gray pathway winding its way up an exterior wall. Gilson pointed out his “family” of black, plastic rats, a scurrying band in a curve in the sandy surface of the multilevel Randyland.
A former cook who now works as a waiter, he’s had no formal art training, barely graduating from high school. “It’s all totally raw,” he said. “I believe in zigging and zagging rather than staying in a normal formula of ABCs, one-two-threes. I say, ‘Break out, be like a butterfly and land.’ I became a puzzler. I put all things together.”
He sometimes speaks in cadence, delivering his message, “That heart seed needs to grow. Your dreams flow. They touch the stars. You are not a mistake no matter where you come from.”
Eager to tell us about one of his projects, Gilson invited us into his narrow studio, where hundreds of wild-eyed aboriginal-looking faces painted on each of more than 100 glass-adorned roof slates hung laundry-line style atop one another look out from a wall facing the elephant-headed brass rail and bar from the former Holiday House nightclub in Monroeville. On the bar, plastic beverage cups of magenta and orange hold blue and green pigments instead of alcohol. Gilson said he turned down a lucrative offer to market his slates in Florida. A very tall, fully decorated Christmas tree stands just beyond them, and outside, rainbow-striped arches, vintage signs and a fanciful map of the North Side are parts of a giant collage that punctuate the bright yellow studio exterior.
Pity the color-blind. A subdued Randyland would be as drab as Kansas to this Pittsburgher’s technicolor Oz.