Hidden Isaiah Zagar mural found during Jim’s Steaks renovation

Isaiah Zagar’s mosaic artwork is Philadelphia — quirky, spontaneous, bold, eclectic — brightening hundreds of drab exterior walls with glittering abstracts of glass, mirrors, tiles, and found objects.

Many are on private property, so when walls come down, alas, so do the murals.

Which brings us to an early Zagar installation, created five decades ago. Sheathed behind drywall in the late 1980s, it was exposed during renovations at Jim’s Steaks following a summer 2022 fire.

When Jim’s Steaks at Fourth and South Streets reopens May 1, the mosaic will be part of an upstairs dining room.

Zagar and his wife, Julia, opened Eye’s Gallery, which specialized in Latin folk art, at 402 South St. in 1968. Zagar, newly into mosaics, festooned the store’s walls and ceilings with them. Eight years later, Abner and Joan Silver opened Jim’s Steaks next door, and the businesses coexisted side by side, two key players on the bustling South Street strip. (Zagar used to point out that he was a vegetarian.)

On the morning of July 29, 2022, a fire inside the electrical box in Jim’s basement destroyed the restaurant, while smoke and water flooded Eye’s. Technicians with the nearby Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, which displays Zagar’s largest work, removed or restored what they could of the mosaics, and the Zagars agreed to sell their building to the Silver family to expand the restaurant.

The Zagars leased space for Eye’s on the next block and promised to allow Ken Silver, who took over the restaurant from his parents, to restore any mosaics that could not be removed.

Early last year as workers linked the buildings, Emily Smith, the Magic Gardens’ executive director, and Stacey Holder, its preservation and facilities manager, were on the second floor. “We had remembered some of Isaiah’s photographs that we had come across, and they showed mosaics in an outdoor vestibule area,” Holder said.

The area, which Silver had earmarked as a semiprivate dining room, was covered with water-damaged drywall, which Holder estimated had been installed in the late 1980s. When a worker cut a hole in the drywall, the mural could be seen. Holder believed that it dated from the mid-1970s.

Magic Gardens is restoring that work and is replacing mosaics on the ceiling. Zagar, 85, will create a new mosaic to fill an empty part of the wall, Smith said. (Zagar was not available to comment this week.)

Holder said the older mural represented a different style — “very abstract” — and showed signs of weathering because it had been outside.

How many galleries encourage patrons to peruse the art while eating a cheesesteak and drinking a soda?

“This could only happen in Philly,” Smith said.