Michigan Public's Stateside podcast spent its May 29 episode at Hamtramck Disneyland, a backyard sculpture installation atop two side-by-side garages at 12087 Klinger Street. The build started around 1990 and went on for the next 25 years. Its creator, Dmytro Szylak, was a Ukrainian immigrant who worked the General Motors assembly line for 30 years and started building the assemblage in his backyard the day after he retired in the mid-1980s.
He died in 2015 at age 92. He was still climbing the ladders the year before he died.
The installation itself is hard to summarize: two garage roofs stacked with whirligigs, hand-painted soldiers, plastic horses, lawn ornaments, a homemade helicopter, a Concorde airliner the size of a wagon, propellers, a wooden Statue of Liberty, Christmas lights kept on year-round, and hidden speakers Szylak could activate to play Ukrainian folk music whenever the mood struck him. For a long stretch after he died, the question of what would happen to the work was open. His daughters didn't want to keep the property.
Hatch Art, the Hamtramck artist collective founded in 2006 by Chris Schneider, raised the money to buy both lots in May 2016. They have been working on the restoration ever since. The garages were sagging.
The wood was rotted. The wiring was a hazard. They have been replacing structural elements piece by piece while keeping as much of Szylak's original work as the Michigan weather lets them keep.
NYT Style Magazine ran a Rachel Corbett feature on the site in late September. Hour Detroit followed. A Sean Bieri piece in the Hamtramck Review went into the restoration weeds.
Renee Willoughby is the current artist-in-residence and lives in one of the four apartments Hatch rents on the property to fund the upkeep. Hatch Art is open weekends and Thursday and Friday evenings at 3456 Evaline. Hamtramck Disneyland itself is visible 24 hours from the alley.
Drop a donation in the box. Don't park in the neighbors' driveways.
12087 Klinger Street, Hamtramck.
