Since 2001, Patrick Amiot has been welding junk into sculpture and giving the pieces to his neighbors on Florence Avenue — turning a three-block residential stretch into one of Sonoma County's stranger, better destinations.

On Florence Avenue in Sebastopol, the fisherman was never supposed to outlast the summer. Patrick Amiot welded it from salvaged parts in 2001 — junkyard bones resolved into something grinning and tall — as a farewell. He was broke, his sculpting career had stalled, and he had plans to move his family to Costa Rica and open a pizzeria. The fisherman was a thank-you to the town.

"I was expecting a city ordinance to tell me to get my s— off the front yard," Amiot told the San Francisco Chronicle. Instead, the city council — a Green Party majority at the time — left it standing. A local newspaper came out. A neighbor asked if he might make something else. "They asked the neighbors, 'What do you think about this?' And the neighbors said, 'It would be nice if he did something else,'" Amiot recalled.

He didn't go to Costa Rica.

More than two decades later, the three-block stretch between Healdsburg Avenue and Wilton Avenue has accumulated more than 30 of Amiot's sculptures across the private front yards of his neighbors — baseball players, batmen, a wicked witch, a Godzilla mid-stomp, houses balanced on chicken feet. His studio, Big Times Art Studio, is at 382 Florence Ave., the geographic anchor of what Sonoma County Tourism now promotes on its official website as part of the region's arts and culture offerings. TripAdvisor rates it 4.8 out of 5.

Amiot builds the forms from salvaged material; his wife and collaborator Brigitte Laurent paints them. The arrangement between artist and block grew slowly and not without friction. "When Patrick started to put sculptures on the street, it wasn't all welcome, but eventually it grew on everyone," Laurent told ABC10. The pieces sit on private property — the Godzilla in a neighbor's yard, the wicked witch on a porch — with no formal public art designation and no signage. Visitors are informally asked to stay on the sidewalk.

The art made neighbors of strangers. "I got to know all my neighbors through the artwork," Amiot told the Chronicle. The annual sculpture calendar he and Laurent produce has raised more than $250,000 for local schools over six years, by the studio's own accounting. In 2016, the City of Sebastopol honored Amiot for his community contributions, including a donated "traffic cat" — a movable junk sculpture whose eyes light up, which the police department deploys at dangerous intersections to slow drivers.

Florence Avenue doesn't announce itself from the main road. Someone turning onto it for the first time finds a residential street with parked cars and lawn furniture — and then, gradually, the figures in the yards, facing outward, belonging to the neighbors.