Move over Delafield! Milwaukee has a smiley barn, too ... well, sort of.
Milwaukee has a smiley barn too. Sort of.
We all know about the smiley barn that comes and goes in Delafield. Well, Milwaukee has its own. Sort of.
You might say it’s actually a big garage. And not exactly smiling. More like a surprised face, or scared or maybe alien Summerfest logo.
It’s right there if you look past the empty lots on the west side of North Holton Street about a block north of East North Avenue in the Harambee neighborhood.
“Well, it’s a barn with a really ugly smiley face on it,” said its creator, Steve Swetlik, when I called to ask him about it. He has owned the house and barn since 2002.
My timing turned out to be sad. He recently lost the property at 2408 N. Buffum St. to the City of Milwaukee in a tax foreclosure after running into money troubles and closing his antique store. “I’m actually moving out this week,” he said.
Steve painted the barn, and its signature face, about six years ago after the city complained about the condition it was in. It’s a cool hayloft
barn from the 1890s, before there were cars, and he wanted to save it.
“I had a younger helper that didn’t dislike ladders as much,” said Steve, who is 55.
They hammered a nail into the center of the barn’s east face and used a string and a pencil to make a circle about 15 feet in diameter.
They painted it lemon yellow and added black oval eyes and what Steve calls a nose, though it looks more like a mouth to me. A black border around an upper window is supposed to be a mohawk haircut.
“You can decide whatever you want it to be,” he said. “It’s like a Rorschach test. What do you see?”
I see a whimsical, though peeling and fading, landmark in a challenging neighborhood. It doesn’t have the polish and visibility of the smiley barn recently restored at the Highway 83 Delafield exit off I-94. And, from what Steve says, it didn’t live up to its potential.
“We never really finished the smiley face. I was going to have additives like a Brewers cap during Brewers season and big lips during Valentine’s Day. That just never panned out,” he said.
Neighbors I talked to expressed mild enthusiasm over the sunshiny face.
“It’s just a garage or barn to me. Everybody has one. You can decorate it any way you choose,” said retiree Billy Green, who has been living on Holton Street for decades.
Sarah Ditzenberger, who runs Fischberger’s Variety store a stone’s throw from the barn, said she likes all the street art you see around there, including Steve’s barn.
“That’s the kind of stuff we can get away with in an eclectic neighborhood,” she said before selling me one of those gag plastic ketchup bottles that shoots a red string when you squeeze it.
The barn sags and looks pretty tired. Trees are growing into the roof shingles. Someone has painted a small dinosaur on the side with the words “never forget.” Steve brushed waves of gray and brown paint on the sides to trick the eye into thinking the building isn’t tilting.
He used to park vehicles in the barn and assumed the original owners kept their horses and buggy in there. In recent years he has used it for storage.
Now that the city owns the property, what will become of the barn? Jeff Fleming, spokesman for the Department of City Development, said an inspector will take a good look before it’s advertised for sale.
Generally speaking, he said, the city does not make significant changes to properties like this, but if the garage/ barn is unsound or unsafe, it might be razed.
Facing that possibility, the giant face looks appropriately distressed, shocked and way less happy than its Delafield cousin. As for Steve, he is clearing out the house and plans to leave Milwaukee after 37 years here. He plans to start over somewhere else.
He says he takes inspiration from a poster and button you may have seen over the years: “Why Be Normal?”
“Yeah, I’m a weirdo,” he laughed. “I try to be a little unusual and surprising in the middle of my relatively boring world.”