-If you grew up around Austin,
there's just certain quirky things you grew up seeing,
and that's kind of what Austin was always about.
We have to hold on to the few quirks we have left.
-I would think that Vince is one
of the few lost relics of Austin.
-I heard about him probably as early as like high school.
It was kind of like a cult following for a while
and a lot of people would be like,
"Oh, have you been to the Cathedral of Junk?"
-I like the cathedral most because of Vince.
Like Vince just makes the place.
-People want to get married here.
They do their engagement things here.
Do I consider myself a local legend?
I don't know what that legend means exactly,
but I'm a local character.
♪♪
[ Dogs howling ]
-Good boys.
I know!
Oh, right, oh.
Some people never make it past the dogs.
What time is it? Ooh, 9:01.
I better grab my phone
because it's time to start answering the phone.
[ Musical ringtone ] And it begins.
Hello.
Yeah. What time did you want to come by?
Well, my name is Vincent Hannaman
and I'm the creator of the Cathedral of Junk,
which is a sculpture I've been working on
for the last 31 years in my backyard
and has become rather famous, I guess.
Title-wise? Well, I mean, nobody calls me the Junk King,
but Vince, Vinnie.
It's a building -- not like a normal building, exactly.
It's three stories tall.
It's got various different staircases
that lead up to the second and third floor.
It's all built out of stuff that's junk.
This is my pot plant.
I don't know.
So you grow pot?
No, probably not.
You know, sometimes I think I know
where things are going to go and then,
they don't want to go there.
They do have a mind of their own.
It's generally put together just by puzzling.
Grab something like that.
Ooh! See? That's -- That's cool.
And then it just kind of puzzles in like that.
Simple as that.
People bring me this stuff
quicker than I can get around to using it.
I even get stuff in the mail.
You know what I call it when it comes in the mail, right?
Junk mail.
But it's true.
I started with a little series
of individual sculptures which grew together
and then, people started asking me,
"What do you call that?"
I honestly didn't know what to tell them.
My mother started calling it the Cathedral of Junk, you know,
kind of only a mom's sarcasm, but that's stuck like glue
and it kind of got a life of its own.
Ooh, wait a minute. Here we go. How are you guys?
-Hi! Good. How are you? -Good.
-Did you guys call?
Hello, this is Vince.
I am, by appointment, if you had an idea what time.
Great. See you around 3:00.
The only way to come here is to actually get through to me
on the telephone and make an appointment
and people do get lucky
and get the Golden Ticket, just showing up.
It does happen,
but you have to be lucky and you can't count on that.
These are people that are just showing up here.
There's always unannounced people.
I hate to be horrible, but, seriously,
like in front of my house.
Yeah, you can block my driveway.
That's okay.
So there's not a website or anything like that,
but I'm listed on a bazillion websites.
You know, if there's a new platform out there,
they put me on it, you know.
I don't think I've ever seen anything TikToky --
whatever the hell -- but I know I'm on it.
-I've never gotten to go because, if you call
and he doesn't answer, then you can't come.
And so, every time I've tried, he doesn't answer, so.
We just called randomly this morning and got lucky.
I would think that Vince is one
of the few lost relics of Austin.
Hopefully, everything will be preserved right now
because all of these things is what like adds
to Austin's charm.
-Those are two of the original sculptures
and part of a domed room that used to be over here,
but because of what I had to tear down
when I got my building permit,
that kind of got all shoved away.
And then, 2010, my neighbor complained.
I mean, to be fair to him,
you know, I wasn't the best neighbor to have.
We did have a lot of crazy, wild parties
and I was completely unapologetic about it
and that's what got the ball rolling
and it turns out that I did have
an unpermitted auxiliary structure.
So it took seven months to -- to get through that process.
The whole time I was noncompliant, actually,
I had no property rights, either.
I couldn't rent, sell, lease, or give away this house.
They put a red sign on the front curb that said,
"Dangerous conditions exist."
I had hundreds of volunteers came out of the woodwork
to help me out, tearing down the stuff,
which was also therapeutic, in a way.
It was horrible! But, I learned how
incredibly strong this thing is.
It's a miracle I got the engineer to sign off on it.
I got the architect to do the drawing.
Everything's all squared away.
But who the heck knows?
You know, you never expect the Spanish Inquisition.
Generally, it's a self-guided tour.
I don't really follow people around.
I get a lot of cheap hipsters here
who bring their girlfriends here for their date, you know,
so their love life is just like rocking around here,
but mine sucks.
It's not the place to really meet anybody.
Both my wives divorced me,
so, if there have been Junk Queens, for sure.
There might be a third. Who knows?
This is a difficult domestic kind of situation
to live in for somebody.
There's no privacy here because there's never
a single day that I don't have people show up unannounced.
Christmas Day, New Year's Day, every day.
Last year, I had a family of five
in my driveway at dawn on Christmas Day,
you know, taking pictures.
And it's like, "Who's the crazy one, here, you know?
Who is the weird one?"
This is my tire iron here.
I got two tire irons.
Get it?
[ Laughs ]
I got to crack myself up.
Sorry.
Some people comment how peaceful it is here.
In a way, it is kind of a church.
-We got married at the Cathedral of Junk.
So I was able to find his phone number
through a shady Yelp! review and just ask flat-out,
"Would it be possible to have a wedding at your art piece?"
And he said, "It is possible."
-He said, "Are you sure, though?"
[ Laughter ] -He made sure to say,
"Are you sure you want
to get married here?" -Yeah.
-Vince was a part of our wedding party.
[ Laughs ] He stood next to his campfire,
stoked it occasionally while we were doing our vows.
I have a distinct memory.
We walked my 65-year-old mother up to the top of the cathedral
and she just had a moment of pure elation, in tears.
Absolutely a local Austin legend.
I don't think anyone else
could've gotten away with what he did.
-Keeping Austin weird is very important.
-And Vince has done a lot to keep Austin weird.
♪♪
-And then there's pictures in the shed here,
kind of a timeline how I got started.
This is a picture of me in 1979,
with one of my first backyard sculptures
in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
When I moved here in 1989,
there was nothing in the backyard.
It was just a big lawn and the oak tree out back.
When I first came to Austin, it was a little bit of a bust.
The economy was a little bit downturn.
That's one of the things that allowed me to do this,
was incredibly cheap rent,
but all that's changed over time.
They say, "Keep Austin Weird," right?
Or Live Music Capital of the World, or something.
Both those things, the weird and the music,
are having a very hard time keeping up with the growth.
You can have weird and -- and -- and musicians and art
and not have affordable housing.
♪♪
-My family's been in town since the late '40s.
You grew up around Austin,
there's just certain quirky things you grew up seeing
and that's kind of what Austin was always about.
Austin was every weird misfit and strange person
that was in the high school class,
that didn't really fit in,
but the problem is, as more people pour in,
they got to live somewhere and so a lot of them ended up
slowly migrating down to South Austin
and that's when, all of a sudden,
South Congress became SoCo,
which none of us locals ever called it, ever.
South Austin is just slowly kind of watering down.
We have to hold on to the few quirks we have left, you know?
I mean, eventually, everything's going to be
your standard-issue strip center.
To have a break from that
and have something that's a little different
and something you're not going to find,
necessarily, everywhere,
that's what makes the city unique.
-After I got divorced for the second time,
I was like really, really down on this whole thing.
She didn't like all the people coming over here.
She didn't like me talking to people.
I don't know. I'm not going to blame it
on her or whatever, but I as like, "Fuck this shit.
I'm just going to get the hell out of here."
I just didn't even want to be in Austin anymore.
So I started tearing stuff down and people tried to stop me.
They -- they came out of the woodwork.
They were like, "Save the Cathedral!"
And I was like --
You know. They wanted to buy the place.
I was like, "You know what?
I built it. I can take it down
and do anything I want. It's not yours."
But, after about six months of tearing it down,
I felt a lot better.
[ Laughs ]
Got my yayas out.
And then, I thought, "You know, maybe not."
I changed my mind.
Then I started building it back up again.
I just see how happy people are when they come over here
and they tell me
that they're glad that there's something like this.
When I tell them that I've been doing this
full-time since 2008,
it makes their day, for some reason,
like they live vicariously through that.
You're glad that they found one dodo bird, still alive.
-It's one of those unique places around Austin,
very unique, very eclectic, very Austin weird.
-I consider Vince a local legend.
I mean, we just looked it up and this was like one
of the top 10 things to recommend.
-It's really cool. It's really --
I've never seen anything like it before.
♪♪
-Alright. Thank you.
♪♪
It'd be cool if it was able to continue the way it is
and provide what I think it does for Austin.
People want to ask me, "What is the meaning," or "Why?"
Well, you know, art was the first invention, right?
There is a purpose to it.
There has to be a purpose to it.
I don't know what it is, other than it might just be
as simple as saying, "I'm here,"
which seems kind of shallow, really, but maybe it is.
You know, the hand prints on the cave wall,
is that just saying, "I'm here, I was here," or...?
"Wow, that's really cool.
[ Laughs ]
Look at my hand, man!"
♪♪