It’s No Ordinary Corral, but a Kind of Horseshoe Art

The first thing you notice are the horseshoes. They’re everywhere.

Welded into a tapered, cylindrical tower, hundreds of them make up the flagpole. The patio furniture is nothing but horseshoes, as are the front gate, the back steps and the foot-high sculptures of guitar-playing cowboys.

Welcome to the Cactus Corral in Sylmar. The one-acre corral is the home, workshop and work-in-progress of Ambrose Meyer, a retired Sylmar contractor and collector who has packed the place with an incredible assortment of sculptures, furniture, weather vanes, tool racks, chimes and other items that he has fashioned from discarded metal.

“It’s just a hobby, more or less. I take the junk people throw away and I make something of it,” said Meyer, who is “working on 80.”

“Sometimes it comes out all right and sometimes not.”

After retiring from his contracting business, Meyer put his energy into his love of collecting and tinkering with metal.

A cactus farm run by his nephew, Jim Nelson, now shares space with Meyer’s creations--a Christmas tree made from glass insulators, buzzards made from an old shovel and deer from railroad spikes.

Meyer doesn’t sell too many of his works--although he will if you offer him a fair price--but he does give them away and trade them for materials.

Dressed in green work clothes, his head capped at the peak by a patch of white hair, the low-key Meyer said he isn’t sure if his work is art.

“It’s something I mostly do for myself,” he said, “to take nothing and make into something.”