Behold: Hamtramck Disneyland. Just feast your eyes on this feat of engineering. Built by Dmytro Szylak--a 90-something-year-old Ukrainian immigrant--Hamtramck Disneyland is a wonder, a delight, and just a little bit creepy. As I mentioned in last week's Michigan Mondays post, this little roadside gem made me remember all over again why I love traveling. Whether it's abroad or in my own backyard (or, at least, Dmytro's backyard), seeing life from another perspective is just plain awesome.
Dmytro began building Hamtramck Disneyland right after he retired from the GM plant, some 30 years ago. He needed, so he said, something to get him out of the house. He started building one thing and then didn't stop until he ran out of space. Dmytro invited us to explore his backyard (for a small "free donation" fee) and we jumped at the chance. Dmytro is clearly proud of his work and even went inside to retrieve a set of professional photographs a Californian photographer once took of the place. "You make pictures," he kept urging us, shuttling us about the neatly shoveled path that extended across the space. Along the way, he pointed out the best places to photograph, and which angles worked the best. Hamtramck Disneyland is indeed overwhelming in its detail, much like Heidelberg Project, and reminds me of the obsessive detailing found in James Hampton's The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. I would visit this piece daily when I interned at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and just marvel at the brain that thought it up.
The scale and imagination involved with each of Dmytro's interactive aluminum sculptures (some of them move and create scenes of people sawing wood and such) was only restrained by the size of his backyard, which is tiny. He told us that he stopped building things because he ran out of space. Still, sometimes something falls out of the sky and he tinkers away. A few months ago, Dmytro walked outside and found a large model rocket sitting on his doorstep. He doesn't know who brought it to him but it delights him. It took four men, he said, to lift the rocket to its current tabletop residence where it dutifully guards the rest of Dmytro's creations. We asked Dmytro why he built Hamtramck Disneyland and he simply said that he went to sleep and woke up with these images in his head. He wanted to make them come true.
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