Photo credits Creative Commons license the original photographer.
A homemade jet. A carousel of rocking horses. Ukrainian music hidden inside a backyard sculpture.
And somehow, all of it ended up attracting visitors from Japan, Germany and Australia.
In a residential neighborhood outside Detroit, retired GM worker Dmytro Szylak spent years turning two garage roofs into something that looked less like a backyard and more like a fever dream.
He started after retirement with no formal art training and apparently no grand master plan. He simply began attaching things.
Then he added more.
And more.
Soon, wind-powered figures spun above the rooftops, lights flickered after dark, wooden soldiers stood beside plastic animals, and a homemade aircraft carried Santa Claus through the chaos.
The whole thing became known as Hamtramck Disneyland.
But beneath the wild collection of toys and mechanical oddities was something surprisingly personal.
Szylak was Ukrainian, and his creation mixed American flags, Elvis, patriotic imagery and pop culture with Ukrainian music and references to his homeland.
It became a peculiar kind of immigrant monument—one assembled not from marble or bronze, but from salvaged objects, imagination and decades of tinkering.
Then came the unexpected twist.
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Explore the Wonder
After Szylak died in 2015, the bizarre backyard attraction could easily have disappeared.
Instead, local artists stepped in to save it.
And there's an even stranger chapter to the story: one of Detroit's most unlikely landmarks once became the backdrop for a Kate Moss fashion shoot.
How did a retiree's backyard project become an international curiosity—and what exactly is still hiding among the pieces today?
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Explore the Wonder
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