Although he never invites them inside, Baki Dazdarevic enjoys the steady stream of visitors who come to get a look at his front yard. They come day and night, he says, “sometimes 10, 11 o’clock in the evening. Two ladies, they visited from Arizona and wrote to ask me for pictures of the house. Another lady, she brought two vans of her friends. They want to see the house. They ring the bell to say hello. They tell me they like it.”
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There’s a lot to see. The lawn is gone, the grass replaced by dozens of inlaid marble rectangles. Several round pits have been left open for spring planting. In the center stands Dazdarevic’s large sheet-metal sculpture: a childlike trumpeter, all big head and short legs, her face defined by oversize glasses. A small U.S. flag dangles from the trumpet’s bell. She’s marching atop a pedestal tiled with tiny ceramic circles in a bright, seafaring blue, which is echoed in the three tile-covered pillars that support the house’s second-floor balcony.
“I was a metalworker, like my father, back in my country,” Dazdarevic says. His country is Bosnia, but he’s been gone so long he still calls it Yugoslavia. He left young, lived in the Middle East and in Hawaii, and finally decided to come to a big city in America. Here he met and married Janna, who is Bulgarian and a registered nurse; they have a construction business, the restaurant, five daughters, and a new puppy.
