On September 27, 2024, the New York Times Style Magazine ran a feature by Rachel Corbett titled "Some of America's Best Art Is in the Yard." Hamtramck Disneyland, the folk-art installation a Ukrainian retired General Motors machinist named Dmytro Szylak built across two garages in his backyard on Klinger Street, was one of the pieces. The address is 12087 Klinger. Szylak (1922-2015) immigrated to the U.S. with his wife in the 1950s, worked at General Motors for 30 years, and started building Hamtramck Disneyland in the early 1990s.
The project ran nearly three decades and was constantly being revised until his death at 92. Hatch Art The installation is roughly 1,945 square feet of plastic horses, hand-painted soldiers, whirligigs, helicopters, a Concorde airliner, fan blades, Christmas lights that ran year-round, and Ukrainian, German, and American iconography arranged in the colors of his three countries. A six-foot windmill animates mechanical figurines on its reverse side when it spins.
When Szylak died, his estate went to probate, and the future of the work was unclear. In March 2016 the property went on the market. Hatch Art, a Hamtramck nonprofit collective founded in 2006 by Chris Schneider, bought it for $100,000 in May 2016.
Sean Bieri, a writer, cartoonist, and Hatch board member, has been running the restoration ever since. Renee Willoughby is the current artist-in-residence, living in one of the four units on the property. "Some of these horses you can see are working within his style, but have kind of drifted and become more individual as well," Bieri told Michigan Public's Stateside in May 2024.
Thehamtramckreview The team treats the place less like a museum and more like a continuation. The lumber that supported much of the original work had rotted by the late 2010s and was carefully taken down for replacement. New work from local and visiting artists has been folded in.
Hamtramck Disneyland belongs to a small group of significant artist-built environments in Michigan, alongside the Heidelberg Project and the MBAD African Bead Museum. The Times piece placed it in the national version of that conversation.
Hatch Art kept restoring rocking horses. You can see plenty from the alley between Klinger and Sobieski. To get into the yard, a Hatch caretaker has to walk you in.
Bruce Weber shot Kate Moss there in 2006, for what it's worth.
Location: 12087 Klinger Street, Hamtramck (alley between Klinger and Sobieski, south of Carpenter)
