![]() ![]() ![]() “I’m pretty much taking it down,” Tracy said. But the front yard is undergoing some change. A pair of mannequin’s legs are patched together with black electrical tape - swinging bike reflectors above justify Tracy’s naming of the piece “Beam me up, Scotty.” A mass of outwardly hanging toilet floats tick back and forth like a bulbous wind chime. Dangling set pieces swirl and stir with the wind. They lead around an old truck camper that’s been made into a bunkhouse. “I kind of hate to see it go, he’s got some things that I like,” she said. Inevitably, his wife grew fond of the clutter. “It’ll cost me $20 to get rid of it!” Tracy says of the decrepit statue. The iconic statue is a remnant of the many decorative pieces that once surrounded the Yard Birds shopping mall in north Chehalis, where Tracy worked after moving from Sequim where he had worked as an art teacher for 10 years. That also goes for the 7-foot Yard Bird in the corner of his property on M Street. Some Styrofoam pieces, especially those in his back yard, will remain. Not long after he and his wife, Pat, bought their house in 1972, he began collecting blocks of the cellular polystyrene from a nearby boat maker and carving them up with a hacksaw, decorating them with garden hose strips, rusty saw blades and ornamental eyeballs. When he’s artful, Tracy’s favorite medium is a big block of Styrofoam. Garbage drops at the landfill are $10 and they go by volume, not weight, Tracy reminds his visitors on Monday more than once, noting he’s now hauled away 30 truckloads. He’s possibly already spent more money deconstructing it than assembling it. When he’s not volunteering, Tracy takes Art Yard apart. “I lose more games than I win,” said the newcomer to pool and longtime admirer of Paul Newman’s character in the movie “The Hustler.” There he’s a food server, a floor sweeper, a dancer, and a pool player, earning himself a new nickname: “Fast Richie.” Tracy volunteers at the Twin Cities Senior Center now to help ford his peculiarity. So he packs it away - block by block - to the landfill and sheds himself of his “outsider status.” He fears it held him back from realizing his true self as a citizen. The yard’s eccentricity lost its attraction for Tracy. “I still work in the basement, I won’t work in the yard,” said Tracy, who also goes by “Richart.” Tracy, improbably, is an ebb tide carrying away the flotsam and jetsam he built Art Yard with. And open spaces of lawn have become visible. ![]() The open invitation to visitors at the corner of Harrison Avenue and M Street in Centralia is canceled. Yet within the past year Tracy tore down the yard’s walls from their 14-foot mark. “The more this place falls apart, the better I like it,” Tracy, 77, says. Tracy actually seems to have built Art Yard just to watch the weather smear a patina across it. What stands today is Tracy’s inner sanctuary, a private yard behind a once public yard that’s now also private, a basement full of vibrantly colorful collage paintings and organized work stations that lie hidden and contrast the gangly sculptures up above, where rust eats metal and blocks of wood and Styrofoam wither under mold and drizzling rain. By Adam Tracy says he began building Art Yard 27 years ago because he wanted to create a roadside attraction. ![]()
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