behind the whimsical metal art.

(bright music) - Well, I've worked construction my whole life as a welder, and about 30 years ago drinking got to be a real habit.

So I quit drinking and then something to occupy my free time, I just started building sculptures.

- [Adam] Tom started creating metal sculptures in his front yard, quickly filling it up, much to the dismay of the township, which said his creations were illegal, so we moved them to the backyard, but that space wasn't big enough.

- 2003 we refinanced our house for another a hundred years, bought this property, made some trails through the woods and zigzagged around where I could get as much trail space as possible and cleaned out the yard and threw all that junk out here and been adding to it ever since.

I mean, I enjoy building the stuff and then you see like especially this time of year, there'll be school buses pulling with, you know, 40, 50 kids jump off and go running through the place and having a ball and you know really enjoying it.

- [Adam] Today Laken and Land spans 37 acres and features more than 100 sculptures, plus picnic areas, pavilions, entertainment stages, a playground and more.

It's free to enter, open year round, and it deserves to be mentioned.

- Yeah, everything out here is scrapped that was going to a recycle or dump or something.

You get into these mines and powerhouses and paper mills and you know big industrial places and they just rip out tons of iron sometimes and you know, you go in there and talk to the right guy and you know tell 'em what you're doing with it and they'll just about give you anything, you know, bring a case of beer on the job and load up with whatever you want, you know?

- [Adam] Visitors can walk the winding trail or drive part of it to admire Tom's creation.

One of my favorites was the rusty chain band.

- That was some conveyor chain I got out of Louisiana Pacific down in Sagola.

And that was the big drag chain where they haul all the mills or the logs up into the mill.

They run 'em through a water bath and clean them in big paddles and that was actually pretty easy.

You just take a piece of chain and bend it like a knee and weld it together and that was it, you know?

So I don't have no real rhyme or reason.

Just every once in a while I'll get an idea of something I'd like to build, but usually it's just whatever I can make out of the junk I've collected.

- [Adam] As I wandered through the park, I was convinced his property had to include an old mine.

Turns out I was wrong.

- No, all that mining stuff is all junk that I hauled here.

Yeah, that's just with all the mining heritage around the area I thought I'd make some type of, you know, mining sculpture and yeah it was just parts and pieces.

The head frame was an old electrical tower from up in the Pagani, the steam drum there was a condensing tank out of the paper mill, the little ore cars were dust collectors from the Tilden mine, the cabin was an old sauna from down in Rumley, the little mixing balling machine was a cement mixer I got from a buddy of mine and the railroad and that all the little ore cars were on the wheels were come off the ore dock and were ladders.

So yeah, there wasn't no mine here, but, well it's different I guess.

I heard that a long time ago, if you're gonna be successful, you either gotta be really good or really different.

I said I think it'd be easier just to be different.

So this is kind of different and you know people seem to enjoy it, come and go as they please.

- [Adam] Each piece can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to complete and Tom does nearly all the work himself.

Now recently retired, he has no plans to stop.

He'll keep turning scrap into art for everyone to enjoy it.

- My mother does a lot of the painting.

If you see where it looks nice, the painting, that's all her creativity.

I'm not much of a painter and I'll slosh one coat of paint on in some color and then she comes down and touches everything up and does all the detail painting.

So I still have a lot of junk and I'm always collecting more.

My daughter's an iron worker and my son is a heavy equipment mechanic, so they get scrap off of their jobs for me and I still got buddies that call every now and then, so I'll be building more sculptures and just keep adding them to 'em.

But yeah, you wanna see something different, stop by, it's open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.