The Second Coming House

Photos by Lorette C. Luzajic.

The Second Coming House

Last summer I travelled from the town I was born, Niagara Falls, Ontario, an hour from my home in Toronto, across the river into Niagara Falls, New York. I went to visit an old friend, but the trip was also a pilgrimage to a spectacular visionary shrine on Ontario Street. It was a perfect summer day, with clear blue skies, and I stood dazzled before the creation of Prophet Isaiah Robertson. 

"When God had me to dig up all the ground, people thought I was crazy," the Prophet told the Buffalo News back in 2006. "When Noah started to build the ark, praise God, on dry land and told them it's going to rain, they thought he was crazy also."

But dig up the yard he did, and in the six foot deep hole in front of the humble house at 1308 Ontario Street in Niagara Falls, USA, Robertson erected a 25 foot cross. It was a cross like no one had ever seen before, despite two millennia of artist-inspired crosses. This cross was downright psychedelic, a kaleidoscopic array of brightly painted oak wood cutouts, concentric circles and a constellation of pointed stars. 

It was the first and central artwork of The Second Coming House, which over time, bloomed with the same dizzying array of exploding shapes, meticulously arranged in stunning geometric patterns. The whole yard was covered, and every inch of the home’s façade, front, sides, and back, as well as the inside of the dwelling. Thousands of wood cutouts form intricate mosaic arrangements, each piece painstakingly painted in red, white, purple, blue, yellow, turquoise, and green. The colours represent the rainbow covenant God made with Noah, that He would never again destroy the world with a flood. 

It was a covenant Robertson saw affirmed every day, in the perpetual rainbows hovering over the Niagara Falls, the trilogy of water falls separating Canada from the United States. Additionally, every single motif has rich symbolic meaning for Robertson: a six-pointed star, for example, represents the Jewish people; a twelve-pointed star represents the twelve tribes of Israel; an eight-pointed star represents Jesus; three circles represent the Trinity, and so on.

There is nothing else that compares, for frame of reference. With some imagination, the bright, opaque colours hint at Caribbean arts. The shape-work bears some resemblance to the detailed folk art patterns of the Pennsylvania Dutch, German immigrants to the neighbouring state. The stylized geometric ornaments are commonly seen as “hex signs” on barns and on quilts. The esoteric symbolism behind the decorative folk traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch (which is really “Pennsylvania Deutsch,” and “Deutsch” means “German”) is convoluted through time, with a blend of ancient agricultural and cosmological interpretations, and Biblical meanings that parallel Robertson’s symbology. The work of contemporary Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes also shares an aesthetic kinship to Robertson’s. Her vivid palette and kaleidoscopic optics of overlapping circles and shapes come to mind, but it is not likely that either artist were aware of each other’s work.
Robertson used no blueprints or plans. Instead, he said, he followed directions straight from the voice of God, the master artist and master carpenter, maker of all things. He placed every piece where God told him to put it. “This is not the work of man,” the Prophet told his friend, photographer Fred Scruton. “No man could be capable of this.”

Robertson was born in Jamaica. Just before his mother’s untimely death when he was twelve years old, she received a vision that God had special plans for her son. He decided to become a carpenter because that was the profession of his Saviour, Jesus Christ. He took some work making coffins, and then built a house with no training in carpentry. In his early twenties, he moved to Canada and worked in construction. When he learned of the lower prices for homes “across the ditch” in Niagara Falls, New York, he moved there with the intention of renovating and reselling homes. It was while doing some repairs with sheet rock for the Mount Erie Baptist Church that he first received instructions from on high, telling him to use oak instead. He used his own money to supply the oak, and inside the patterns of the wood grain, he found Biblical messages from God on how to proceed.

Following this calling, Robertson received another prophecy, and began work on his own house, transforming it into a riot of sacred symbolism and joyful rainbows. He worked for ten years on the house, and believed the second coming of Christ would take place in 2014. Every soul, living or past, would see his tribute to God’s will on Judgement Day.

The year of Isaiah’s prediction came and went. In 2020, he had a stroke and passed on into glory. The Kohler foundation began the work of preservation to keep the cultural treasure standing in perpetuity, like the promise rainbow it represents. 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic
 

A vintage poster for Pennsylvania Dutch barn signs.