Rubble, Rubble, Toil, and Trouble

Glueheads and Barbed Wire
Frank Giglio paid $26,000 for his house and an adjoining lot when he bought it at a sheriff's sale in 1986. A turn-of-the-century mansion, it features a massive slate roof, large dormers, a pillared front porch, and rich interior molding, all hints of its fading glory on what was once the West Side's Millionaires' Row.

A self-described real-estate speculator, Giglio knew a good deal when he saw one. He certainly should have--he was once a City of Cleveland building inspector.

Tremont was a different place in the late 1980s, not yet a weekend destination for Yuppies or a boon for apartment developers. Aside from lifelong residents whose lineage could be traced directly to Eastern Europe, only artists toiled about the neighborhood.

Giglio fit right in, spending much of his time in the yard, cultivating his garden and adding to his collection of metal and concrete artifacts and large pieces of stone recovered from razed buildings. "When I came down here thirteen years ago, no one cared what I did," he says. "The people that came here were a lot of artists. Everybody had a different aesthetic here."

Giglio, 45, whose healthy build and hard skin reflect the time he spends working outdoors, says he quit his city job in the early 1990s after a long-running dispute with his boss. Since leaving the city, he says he has worked occasionally as a cab driver.

Giglio has made some attempts to repair his house, taking advantage of the city's paint-assistance program to dress up the exterior in garish colors, which are now cracked and peeling. He used portions of his retirement money to fix the house's roof and made temporary repairs to the gutters and porch.

At the time Giglio purchased the house, it was zoned as a multi-unit apartment, providing good income potential. But he never formally rented the units, he says, instead allowing occasionally homeless friends to crash in the house.

What little money Giglio earned, he spent on his yard, on birdseed, and on his dog and numerous cats. Meanwhile, the house slipped deeper into disrepair. According to court records, Giglio narrowly escaped foreclosure proceedings three times. He has since paid off the mortgage.

Time and energy that did not go into the house went into the yard, which got progressively wilder. Over the past ten years, Giglio has planted a variety of flowers and plants, and allowed other wildflowers to grow. At the front of his yard, running along the sidewalk, he cultivated a wall of giant lilacs, which held up the wire fence and shielded the rest of the yard from sight. Beyond the lilacs, a circle of bricks encased a small pond and a bed of lilies. Elsewhere in the yard, among incomplete stone walkways, were hostas, elecampane, marigolds, tulips, and huge sunflowers, as well as a variety of bushes and trees. What the city called "noxious plants" in its violation notices were to Giglio life-affirming flora, like the milkweed he let grow to feed monarch butterflies and the herbs he planted for medicinal purposes.

As for the piles of junk targeted by the city, Giglio considered much of it art (or potential artwork), from the mass of tangled metal rebar to the three stacks of Missouri sandstone, which he says represented a pagan goddess. The Christmas lights were used to illuminate walkways in the yard.

Given the attention generated by his yard, and the time Giglio devoted to it, it's easy to see why he became so protective. But Giglio is a quirky figure in the neighborhood, alternately hostile and friendly, occasionally eating at St. Augustine's Hunger Center down the street. To some neighbors, his protectiveness borders on paranoia.

"For Frank, it's like the Battle of Wounded Knee," says Ward 13 Councilman Joe Cimperman. "It's nice to see [Giglio's] supporters there to plant seeds, but it would be better if they brought paintbrushes."

"Have you seen his house?" asks Giglio, displaying photos of high weeds and an abandoned car in the yard of the councilman's former rented property. "Why didn't Cimperman talk to me like a man or real person? He canceled appointments and avoided me."

Giglio has even gotten into skirmishes with homeless people living under the highway behind his property. He says they tried to break into his house and have aggravated Merlin by urinating in front of him. "They are nothing but glueheads," he claims. Giglio strung barbed wire behind his house to prevent people from breaking in the back.

Giglio has also verbally harassed city crews trimming the vacant lot next door, when they attempted to cut down the sunflowers he planted there. "That's like spitting in my face," he says. "I take better care of the lot than they do, picking up trash and cigarette butts."

Pagans Among Us
As the weeds and bushes thickened over the years, Giglio's yard became a cipher to the outside world, increasingly difficult to see. "The inside was like an arboretum, with bricked pathways," says one regular visitor. "From the outside, it looked like a jungle."