Things are looking up
If you look aloft at certain locations in the city you might spot some particularly grotesque gargoyles clinging to the sides of buildings, holding their victims’ torn-off heads. These are the work of Randy Morrison, a noted Mardi Gras float sculptor who has recently turned his creativity toward making and propagating these macabre outdoor figures. The creatures are constructed of lightweight steel-reinforced fiberglass foam, each gargoyle weighing about 15 pounds.
Medieval churches, especially in France, were adorned with gargoyles possibly for two conflicting reasons. One was to scare evil spirits away. The other was to illustrate what horrors awaited the townsfolk if they didn’t get their butts into the pews and load up the collection plates. Their functional purpose was as gutter spouts to direct rainwater off the roofs.
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Address 1469 Magazine Street, 1507 Magazine Street (St. Vincent’s Guest House), and 709 Jackson Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70130 | Tip Alex Podesta is sometimes called the bunny-man artist. His life-sized statues of grown, bearded men in bunny outfits peer down from the rooftop of 1228 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. Each one was sculpted using a plaster mask of Podesta’s own face.
A complete history of gargoyles was lavished, nearly relentlessly, upon Morrison by his neighbor, Gregory Lewis, in an effort to persuade him to create a gargoyle for the exterior of his house. Finally won over (or worn down), Morrison worked by night for several months in a spider-infested shop owned by Lewis to sculpt the beast.
Lewis mounted the gargoyle on Halloween 2012. The statue was an immediate success, as evidenced by the number of strangers who subsequently solicited Morrison to make gargoyles for their homes or businesses, including a former synagogue at 709 Jackson Street—where, as soon as the ghoulish sculpture was installed, the frequent incidents of neighborhood kids breaking windows in the vacant building mysteriously ceased. Morrison’s gargoyles are now in several states and three locations around the city. In the patter of tour guides on the Hop On Hop Off buses, Morrison has been amused to overhear some say that his gargoyles were placed on houses to ward off evil during the yellow fever outbreaks in the late 19th century.
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