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 came from Ukraine, lived a stretch in Germany, then settled in Hamtramck and spent his working life on the line at General Motors. When he retired, he needed a project. So in 1992 he started bolting and wiring and painting things onto the tops of his two backyard garages — some bought, some salvaged, some hand-built — and didn’t really stop until around 1999. He called it his Disneyland, and he meant it: a private amusement park assembled out of whatever passed through his hands, two stories tall, in a city two square miles around.

Hamtramck is the right place for it. The town is its own city entirely 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.

He died in 2015, at 92, and for a moment the whole thing looked like it might go to the dumpster. Then a Hamtramck nonprofit, Hatch Art, bought the two houses it’s attached to and took on keeping it standing and repainted. So the pinwheels still spin in the alley, a retired autoworker’s idea of paradise, looked after now by the neighbors who grew up walking past it.