The Sunnyslope Rock Garden is an odd cluster of tiny buildings, weird masks and rock fountains, on the front lawn of a house in a weedy, biker neighborhood. Builder Grover Cleveland Thompson, who died in 1978, moved to this unincorporated area of Phoenix in 1952, and spent twenty-two years building his fantasy world. He had been inspired by Petersen Rock Garden in Redmond, OR, a more ambitious testament to the onset of dementia concretia.
Thompson used shards of Fiestaware because it was cheap, and rumored to be radioactive. "Only a little Strontium 90, " says current owner Marion Blake (Marion snapped the place up when she moved from New York twenty years ago).
Thompson cast the faces of his figures by pouring concrete into '50s Halloween masks.
