Collector’s Item : Echo Park Yard an Eyesore to Some, Trendy Art to Others

Is it artful? Or awful?

Residents of an Echo Park hilltop who have been fighting for months over what to call Gary Leonard’s front yard may have to go to court for the answer.

Leonard has turned a collection of discarded bicycles, toasters, rusty bedsprings, garden tools, machine gears, car parts and scrap metal into freewheeling forms that have all but swallowed up his hillside home near the north end of the 2400 block of Echo Park Avenue.

Art, say Leonard and his supporters, who insist that he has created the kind of whimsical sculpture that would sell for big bucks in trendy Los Angeles galleries.

Trash, answer most of his neighbors, who assert that the growing pile of junk has become an eyesore lowering the area’s property values and endangering children and motorists on the narrow, meandering street.

Los Angeles city officials, who have been gingerly investigating the dispute since last fall, say it’s a touchy issue they wish had never been dumped in their laps.

“Nobody’s really willing to determine whether it’s art or junk,” said Sylvia Novoa, a deputy to City Councilwoman Gloria Molina, who has tried to referee the fight. “I’m not an art critic. I don’t know if it’s art.”

City Building and Safety Department administrators have failed to persuade Leonard to voluntarily remove the sculpture. Department officials contend that the city building code prohibits such accumulations in residential yards.

Department investigator Tim O’Conner chose his words carefully as he described Leonard’s collection first as “junk” and then as “debris.”

“I should say the ‘material’ is in violation,” O’Conner finally said.

But officials have given Leonard the benefit of the doubt. They delayed seeking a court order to force Leonard to clean his yard so he would have time to petition the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission to designate his sculpture a cultural monument.

Commissioners rejected his application last month. Although Leonard has the right to re-apply, he hasn’t yet. So Building and Safety officials have decided to ask the city attorney’s office on Friday to file criminal charges.

Thomas K. Nagano, who helped prepare Leonard’s first cultural landmark application, said it was rejected because the yard was still “a work in progress.” Nagano, a business agent for Los Angeles artists, said a new application will be submitted when Leonard finishes his creation this fall.

The yard sculpture, he said, “is changing the contextual feeling of Echo Park--and I think changing it for the better.”

“It is garbage, but it is art,” he said. “It is definitely sculpture. His whole yard is a statement. He understands where Los Angeles is going.”

Leonard is digging in his heels.

“I’m prepared to go the distance,” said the 39-year-old Encino-born photographer, who moved to Echo Park 10 years ago. “I’m proud of my work. You can see the fun if you look at the different textures and colors.”

Leonard said he started creating sculpture from wired-together castoffs about five years ago as therapy after a bitter divorce.

“Working at this has kept me sane. Isn’t it funny that it makes me look crazy?” he said. “I’d been working on it some time when about two years ago I crossed a line. One day, nobody noticed it. Then the next day, everybody did.”

Neighbors first complained informally to Molina about the front yard in mid-1988. According to the councilwoman, an investigation indicated that Leonard’s work did not create a hazard. When the collection continued to grow, 26 irate neighbors filed a protest petition last fall demanding action by the city.

“This can’t be art. This is overkill,” said Andy Aybar, an actor who lives next door to Leonard. “He’s decimated what once was a lovely property. I don’t see him as a persecuted artist, and I try to be real liberal and open-minded.”

Homeowner Stephanie Brooks lives across the street and up the hill from Leonard. She looks down on his work in more ways than one.

“I consider myself as having very liberal views on art,” she said. “I don’t consider what he’s doing art.”

Others in the neighborhood, traditionally one of Los Angeles’ most eclectic, have more mixed views. A man traveling past Leonard’s house in a station wagon shook his head and waggled his forefinger in a circle to silently signal his opinion that both the sculpture and the sculptor were wacko.

Greg Wall stopped to consider the piles of discards as he walked toward his home two blocks away.

“It does look like a lot of junk,” Wall said. “But I’m surprised there’s a lot of complaining. It’s not as though there’s a lot of order to the architecture up here. Maybe it would bother me if I lived closer.”

From his perspective--standing beneath the hood of a 1951 Chevrolet that serves as the front porch to his 87-year-old house--Leonard said his work has been a positive influence on Echo Park. He urged a visitor with a camera to photograph the faintly anthropomorphic figures, not him.

“This has gotten me close to my neighbors,” he said. “I never used to talk to them before. Now I do. It’s like ‘Ozzie and Harriet.’ ”

The city shouldn’t be preparing to serve him with a subpoena, Leonard said.

Instead, he said, “I should be getting a plaque.”