A Fragile Vision : Kilgore Bohorquez fashioned a work of art from the debris of a disposable society.

The Chicken Shack ended like an O. Henry story: suddenly and with an odd twist.

For seven years, Kilgore Bohorquez and Karen Reynolds struggled to turn their Reseda back yard into a maze of folk art. At the entrance, they erected a gate of rust and bolts that looked like hell’s own door and, inside, they laid a stone path that curved between red fences. An iron pagoda stood amid dozens of sculptures on the quarter-acre grounds. Oil drums, stacked one atop the other, enclosed a gracefully shaded patio.

“The first time you walk in,” said Frank McCallick, who came to pay his respects during the creation’s final hours, “nobody warns you what you’re walking into and you find yourself in a Disneyland.”

The heart of the Chicken Shack was a long, low building that had been, in fact, a chicken coop in the 1920s. It was remodeled to include a nightmarish lounge and a music room with a glowing, mock-disco floor. Television sets, stacked in the corners, hummed and flickered gray light.

Friends came to this place to barbecue chicken, drink tequila and strum guitars on Sunday evenings. “You walk in, and you’re immediately transported to a different frame of mind,” said Lynn Coleman, a Woodland Hills painter. Bohorquez and Reynolds never charged for admission or anything else.

“I only wanted the freedom to build this place,” Bohorquez said, “and invite as many people as possible.”

The problem was, he and Reynolds didn’t own the property. They stayed there, rent-free, at the invitation of a friend who lived in the house in front. So, perhaps, the seeds of their misfortune were sown at the start.

For almost seven years, this friend and benevolent landlord helped with the work and some of the expenses. At parties, he dressed in weird costumes to greet arriving guests. But two months ago, with no warning, he announced that the Chicken Shack was wrong. He spoke vaguely of morals and personal-injury lawsuits. The place, he insisted, should be destroyed.

A few weeks ago, it was.

Grass-roots art. Folk-art environment. Various names have been given to creations such as the Chicken Shack.

In a 1983 article, Smithsonian magazine estimated that hundreds of such artworks, “as grandiose in purpose and in scale as they are private in conception,” exist or have existed across the country. Many are known only to their creators and neighbors. Others have gained notoriety. The Rock Garden Tavern in Phillips, Wis., with its hundreds of concrete sculptures, became a county park. Locally, the Watts Towers, the Trapper’s Lodge at Pierce College and Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village in Simi Valley have been named state landmarks.

But, as Smithsonian pointed out, most such creations are “as fragile as the life of its builder.”

Bohorquez, who also goes by the name Steve, had tried twice before to build an inhabitable artwork. The first time--prophetically--he was living with friends who kicked him out after six months. The next attempt, in his mother’s Canoga Park garage, was discovered by city building inspectors and condemned.

“I see myself as an urban artist,” the 42-year-old explained. His art was a form of rebellion, “basically an extension of graffiti. Graffiti is illegal, so was this.”

The third attempt sprouted from a yard of weeds. He and Reynolds converted a garage into their apartment. They began filling the chicken coop with debris and garage-sale trinkets.

“There were never any plans,” said Reynolds, 30, who studied architecture at UCLA. “Everything grew depending on what materials we had. It expanded layer upon layer.”

Slim Evans, a drummer who has played with Los Angeles bands such as the Apache Dancers and Rank and File, said several years ago: “When you pass an old painting in a trash dump and you can’t decide if it’s ugly or beautiful or just strange, that’s the kind of thing you drag out to the Shack.”

The result was pure sculpture, Bohorquez says, a juxtaposition of shapes and textures. In simpler terms, he looked at the world around him--buildings and cars and mountains--and tried to recreate what he saw. The Chicken Shack was how Earth would look if it were up to him.

The coop’s anteroom, for example, was dominated by a giant witch’s caldron--a leftover prop from one of the horror-film sets he and Reynolds built to pay for food. Pennies, scattered on the floor, glittered in dim light. Videotaped scenes from the Disneyland submarine ride showed continuously through a ship’s porthole in the wall (a television monitor lay hidden behind).

So the place was, at its core, essential Southern California. Both its creators are natives, and Bohorquez, a longtime surfer who traces his lineage directly to Malibu legend Mickey Dora, bathed the surroundings with images and colors of the sea. Wrecked cars and pieces of machinery alluded to the automotive society. Hollywood was represented by the secondhand props, which included ghoulish latex heads and body parts.

“It had demented aspects,” Bohorquez said, “but life has demented aspects.”

The urge to create outside art’s mainstream--the glitter gulch of galleries and critics--is not uncommon. New York sculptor Michael Heizer carves Gargantuan shapes in the remote Southwest desert. Donald Judd has accumulated his own oasis of paintings, sculptures and furniture in Marfa, Tex. (though he exhibits extensively elsewhere).

Like other homespun artists, Bohorquez retreated a step farther, hiding his primitive art in an utterly residential neighborhood. Passersby saw only the house up front, a neglected lawn and a gravel driveway that led to a fenced back yard.

“A genuine, spontaneous, un-sponsored and probably illegal artistic happening in the heart of the San Fernando Valley” was what Beach Culture magazine called the Chicken Shack in a 1990 article. “Trash-art eclecticism, a post-modern Watts Tower.”

To get inside, you had to be invited. Once inside, you became a friend and were welcomed to return. “To me,” Reynolds said, “the Shack was a combination of all the people who ever came here.” In fact, this hangout functioned best not as a showpiece but as a site for creation and interaction.

On a given afternoon, a magazine photographer would be using the grounds as a backdrop for a portrait. On another day, a filmmaker would be taping an art video there. Monitors and editing decks filled a small room inside the coop.

“The place reminded me of an artists’ colony at the turn of the century, where artists used to come together and exchange ideas and create,” said Beatrice Castro, a South Los Angeles music student.

Said Walter Mladina, a Tarzana photographer: “It was a nice place to come and talk and be intelligent.”

During barbecues, guests took turns playing guitars and drums. Some, like Evans, were professionals, while others were virtually tone-deaf. These jam sessions lasted for hours. And several times a year, the Chicken Shack threw parties. Guests would dress in costume to make a movie or, on one occasion, form an impromptu orchestra.

“We had all these instruments made of old, rusty car parts, and we would bang them in unison,” recalled Lonnie Lloyd, who draws storyboards for Disney cartoons. “We just kept playing, banging, making our own music.”

Bohorquez and Reynolds often profited from their hospitality. Guests donated odd bits and pieces. A Hollywood designer was so impressed with the place that she employed the couple to help design an album cover for Parachute Express, a popular children’s-music group. A Santa Monica restaurateur hired them to work on his cafe.

“Steve was able to make something out of nothing,” said David Teck, owner of the World Cafe. “He utilized things that would be considered garbage by some people and he was able to turn it into gold.”

Bohorquez now disassociates himself from the eatery, contending that Teck tinkered with his design. The experience reaffirmed his desire to continue working, as much as possible, outside the mainstream.

How do you explain a sense of purpose? Bohorquez asks. At 30, he was working as a plumber, building spas in Malibu Colony, making good money. One day he quit his job.

“The Shack came out of nowhere,” he said. “It came from nothing except the fact that I was tired of being a weekend artist.”

Fittingly, he ended up in a San Fernando Valley neighborhood that had been a utopian colony in the early 1920s. A man named Charles Weeks founded the enclave of poultry growers with hopes of balancing commerce and aesthetics. He established schools, a community center and a Weeks Colony Orchestra.

After brief prosperity, the colony was wiped out in the Depression.

There were other precursors to the Chicken Shack. Bohorquez recently learned that a great-uncle, a man he’d never met, had died. He searched out the old man’s Topanga house, a ramshackle place with a sign out front that read “El Shack.” Inside were collections of fossils, Chumash Indian artifacts and Spanish armor.

“That explained some things for me,” the artist said. “I collect the contemporary refuse of my time. He collected the contemporary refuse of his time. I guess there’s a lot to say for genes.”

And as if the Fates were, again, preparing him for his own future, Bohorquez found his great-uncle’s house readied for demolition by the landowner.

“It was going to become condos or whatever,” Bohorquez said.

On the night before his own home was to be destroyed, a Friday in June, 30 or so people gathered for a party. The place had been gutted, its contents transferred to the garages of friends and relatives, where the stuff will remain until Bohorquez and Reynolds find another home or sell some of the pieces. Candles flickered throughout the darkened, empty apartment as color slides of earlier days clicked across a large screen. The living room was flooded with deep-blue water, forcing guests to hop between platforms that had been set in place for the evening.

“We’re taking on water!” one arrival yelled. “We’re going down.”

The mood was subdued as a three-piece combo played from a dry corner of the entryway. Guests offered their condolences. With dignity befitting a tragedy’s protagonist, Bohorquez said he was looking forward to starting a new project, though he wasn’t sure what that would be. “I’ve basically taken this as far as it will go,” he said. Tinges of anger showed through his optimism. The destruction of his home, he told the group, was symbolic of the way art is suppressed in American society.

Said Mladina: “The Chicken Shack was an island. And now it’s gone.”

Shortly before 11 o’clock, Bohorquez and Reynolds waved goodby. They were headed for his mother’s house, where they will stay for a while. Remaining guests wandered through the yard, picking through the ruins, searching for a souvenir to take home.