Hamtramck Disneyland: one retired autoworker's two garages of joy

Walk down the alley between Klinger and Sobieski streets, just south of Carpenter, and the sky over two ordinary garages erupts into pinwheels, propellers, American flags, plastic horses, year-round Christmas lights, wooden soldiers with toy guns, and a homemade airplane. This is Hamtramck Disneyland, and it was built by one man with time on his hands and nowhere he’d rather put it.

Dmytro Szylak grew up in Ukraine, immigrated to the United States with his wife in the 1950s, and worked for General Motors for 30 years. After retiring in the mid-1980s, he began bolting, wiring, and painting things onto the tops of his two backyard garages — some bought, some salvaged, some hand-built. He kept changing the installation until his death in 2015. He called it his Disneyland, and he meant it: a private amusement park assembled out of whatever passed through his hands.

Hamtramck is the right place for it. The town is its own city, all but surrounded by Detroit, long a magnet for immigrants — Polish for most of the last century, more recently Yemeni, Bangladeshi, and Bosnian — and the kind of dense, tight-knit place where a man’s backyard becomes a neighborhood landmark. Szylak would come out and chat with the tourists who found his alley.

After Szylak died at 92, the installation had no clear future. Hatch Art took ownership in May 2016 and now repairs and maintains it, restoring original pieces while replacing materials that cannot survive another Michigan winter. The alley still holds a retired autoworker’s idea of paradise, now cared for by the local artists who saved it.