The New York Times put Hamtramck Disneyland in a national conversation

On September 27, 2024, T: The New York Times Style Magazine published a feature by Rachel Corbett titled "Some of America's Best Art Is in the Yard," a look at homemade environments that artists build across their own properties. Hamtramck Disneyland, the kinetic folk art landmark on Klinger Street, sat in that company.

The piece is its own backyard. Dmytro Szylak, a retired General Motors machinist, built Hamtramck Disneyland across two garages he owned at 12087 Klinger Street. Born in 1922, he grew up in Ukraine and immigrated to the United States with his wife in the 1950s. He worked at General Motors for roughly 30 years, retired in the mid-1980s, and started building soon after. The project ran for close to three decades, constantly revised, until his death in 2015 at age 92.

Per Hatch Art, the nonprofit that now owns it, the installation covers about 1,945 square feet of whirling, brightly striped structures: hand-painted figures, found photographs and posters, lights, motion, and sound, with American and European imagery layered together. It rattled and spun in the wind, and thousands of visitors a year made it a stop.

When Szylak died, the property's future was uncertain. It went on the market in early 2016. Hatch Art, a Hamtramck arts collective that works out of the city's former police station on Evaline Street, stepped in, running a public fundraising campaign and taking ownership that May. Metro Times reported the price at $100,000.

Since then, Hatch Art has treated the place less like a frozen museum and more like an ongoing work. The team rehabs what Szylak left, patches what has worn, and lets new hands carry the style forward. Sean Bieri leads the restoration, and Renee Willoughby has served as the artist-in-residence on the property.

"Some of these horses you can kind of see are working within [Szylak's] style, but have kind of drifted and become more individual as well," Bieri told Michigan Public's Stateside in May 2024. He has described mixing mural paint with a clear coat to make the colors last longer than the originals did, an effort to keep the whole place going at once.

Hamtramck Disneyland sits with a small set of significant artist-built environments in Michigan, alongside the Heidelberg Project and the MBAD African Bead Museum. The Times feature placed it in the national version of that conversation. It is not the first time the outside world came calling. In 2006, photographer Bruce Weber shot Kate Moss there for a W magazine spread on Detroit.

You can see plenty of it from the public alley between Klinger and Sobieski, south of Carpenter. To get inside the yard, a Hatch caretaker walks you in.