It rises improbably from the Central Northside’s Jacksonia Street,
candy-colored testimony to one man’s efforts to revitalize an
inner-city neighborhood in transition. Bright yellow dominates the
three-story building, but it also features color-coded maps — oranges
and teals burst from the walls — of North Side neighborhoods. Wooden
stick-ons — footballs for Heinz Field, birds for the aviary — add
highlights. And it’s surrounded by banana trees and shrubs shooting
happily from enormous lavender pots.
That’s not all. Walk just a
block from the pastel palace and you’ll find a narrow street lined by
parallel vegetable gardens with carefully bricked walkways and
signature topiaries. This whole unlikely oasis is largely the work of
one man
Welcome to Randyland.
That’s what Randy Gilson
calls his creation. Though volunteers and civic groups have pitched in,
Gilson, 50, has done most of the work himself, using recycled and
trashed materials to fashion a magnet for a neighborhood reinventing
itself.
“Everything I’ve done has been a lesson,” he says. “It
taught me that you do not need an army. You, you alone, have been
empowered by whatever spirituality you believe in, to achieve all
successes.”
Gilson first learned the value of other’s discards
while growing up poor in
Homestead with his five siblings and mother, a
Salvation Army minister. Modest Christmas celebrations reminded the
youngster of what his family didn’t have.
“We got socks,
underwear, one present from Mom and one from the church,” he recalls.
“Four little presents under the tree and that was it.”
For young
Randy, it was too joyless. He began scouring the neighborhood for
abandoned bicycles and toys that he would repair and store in his
basement.
“I would bring them up on Christmas Eve so that my house looked like the houses I saw in pictures,” he says.
It
was a lesson that served him well in the early 1980s when he moved to
the Northside while earning his cooking certification at the
Community College of Allegheny County. In his adopted neighborhood, he was struck
by the paradox of well-dressed people skirting piles of garbage as they
walked from home to car.
An Act of LoveWithout really having a master plan, he
began to rip out the old metal planters that had been used,
ineffectively, to guide the growth of now dead or dying plants. He
cleared the related debris. He bought a whiskey barrel, filled it with
soil and a shrub, and set it before a house. Like that, he had
completed his first streetscape. It inspired him to do others, and it
attracted the neighborhood children, who peppered him with questions
about his newfound mission. Gilson explains:
“I didn’t know what
else to say, so I would answer: ‘We all have to do something through
love. This is my way of loving the neighborhood.’ After saying that
thousands of times, I started educating myself. I thought, ‘I
am doing all that I said I was doing.’ That reinforced my dream.”
He
also discovered a hitherto hidden streak of entrepreneurship that may
explain why he works primarily without the assistance of established
organizations. They already have their projects.
“I wanted a new
program, a raw program, an untapped program,” Gilson
says. “I wanted a
program that I could help drive, not something that would repeat what
everybody else did. I wanted to take an untouched situation and create
it, mold it, make it my own.”
The New Randy Gilson
A new
personality was emerging, part Bob Vila, part Rex Humbard. More
confident of himself now, Gilson redoubled his efforts, parlaying his
zeal and expertise in procurement to transform his neighborhood. He
developed a particular knack for finding building materials dirt-cheap.
With all the demolition in the neighborhood, bricks seldom were
a problem. He found what he calls “oops” paint and wood, material that
would have been tossed had he not badgered merchants for them. From the
long-defunct Holiday House he rescued a gem — the elegant bar from the
club’s comedy room that now serves as Gilson’s workbench. For the giant
pots he needed for his street plants, he hectored
The Home Depot until
they sold him distressed pieces at $25 each.
The Big DaddyOver the course of
25 years, Gilson extended his recycler’s touch to a 30-block area. He
estimates that he’s installed 800 streetscapes, 50 vegetable garden
plots and eight parks. Tom Armstrong, former chairman of the
Pittsburgh City Planning Commission chairman, actually started one of the gardens (with the
help of the
Western Pennsylvania Conservancy) on land he owns — a
remarkable contribution to the neighborhood since Armstrong sold the
house adjacent to the garden parcel and realizes no revenue from the
remaining property. Once Armstrong got the ball rolling, he left the
rest to Gilson.
“He’s the one who made it work well,” Armstrong
says. “”If you weren’t
doing a good job with your parcel, he would give
you the dickens. He was the Big Daddy. It’s nice to see it in good
hands and see people taking pride in it.”
Though he’s had some
help from organizations such as the conservancy, Gilson estimates that
he’s invested $90,000 of his own funds in his efforts. That’s a sizable
outlay for anyone but even more impressive for someone who’s worked as
a cook, then server, at the
Westin Pittsburgh Convention Center Hotel
(It was the Vista when Gilson began there.) for the past 22 years. But
he’s comfortable with the expense.
“If you feel your happiness, your passions,” he says, “then you surely will be rich.”
A Neighborhood Renaissance
His
home, though, remains the centerpiece of Randyland. Gilson bought the
three-lot parcel at auction in 1996 for $11,000 and has since spent
about $100,000 creating the city’s most colorful building. The living
quarters, while quite comfortable and well appointed, mirror the oops
nature of the outside. Some of the carpeting, for example, was salvaged
from the dumpster of a local hotel.
Randyland is more than a
colorful curiosity; it’s a vital element in the renaissance of the
Central Northside. Real estate agents bring prospects to Randyland to
showcase the neighborhood. Tourists visit with cameras,
eager to be
photographed against the home’s high-bright hues. The neighborhood is
abuzz with other activity as well. The
Mattress Factory in the nearby
Mexican War Streets continues to serve as an anchor. Roughly midway
between the Mattress Factory and Randyland, developers Ralph Falbo and
Pennrose Management Company have converted the historic “Widows’ Home”
to 24 units of rental housing.
And with so much development
happening around the corner on Federal Street, Gilson wants to do even
more. Now that he’s turned over the vegetable gardens to the neighbors
who tend and harvest their 10x20 plots, he plans to finish the map on
his home’s exterior and create a community meeting/celebration venue in
his yard; he’s already storing outdoor sculptures in his studio. The
final component will be a coffee shop on the ground floor which he
envisions as a bastion of bonhomie — with no computers.
“I don’t want people to open up a box and build another box around them,” he says.
On
a recent oops shopping trip to Shadyside, Gilson unearthed a charm
shaped like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Inscribed on the charm are
the words: “I am unstoppable.” Gilson shelled out $5 for the jewelry
and placed it on his keychain because he sees himself as both
unstoppable and a piece of the greater puzzle that is human endeavor.
“If
I can leave one message for the world,” he says, “it would be this:
It’s not what’s in your pocket but what’s in your soul that counts. If
things aren’t exactly what you want, recreate them, restructure them,
rebuild them your way.”
Captions:
Randy Gilson
The facade of Randy Gilson's house featuring his map of the North Side
Gilson at home, gaining inspiration from the (painted) sky
It's always sunny...
...on Jacksonia Street
All photographs happily copyright Brian Cohen