A new mural unveiled on Main Street will pay tribute to one of uptown’s most memorable personalities.
A mural showing the former Milt’s Sweet Shop was unveiled on Main Street Sept. 22. The mural, airbrushed by local artist Tim Dubreuil and Dirtbag Kustoms, shows the former shop and its proprietor, David “Milt” Young. The mural, now mounted on the side of the Uptown Emporium, overlooks a vacant lot where the sweet shop once stood.
Creation of the work was fully funded by the Flin Flon Neighbourhood Revitalization Corporation and overseen by the Pineroot Mural Festival. Pineroot has been responsible for producing two other murals on the west side of Flin Flon - first, the raven and medicine wheel mural visible along the Perimeter by artists Alex Bighetty in 2020, then a second, larger landscape piece on the heating plant at Main Street and First Avenue in 2021.
The building, which first opened as Kandy Kitchen in 1935, became Milt’s Place in 1944 when Young bought it, with the owner later renaming it to its now-famous name. In its narrow and cramped four walls, Young sold candy, milkshakes, coffee and sandwiches, magazines and comic books, along with batches of baked goods and cinnamon buns that, decades later, people can still recall the taste of with fondness.
“I remember when Milt’s was here, as a boy - I’d be walking down Main Street as a 10-year-old and I was lusting after those glazed donuts,” said Tim Spencer, the chairman for Pineroot.
Young closed up shop in the 1970s, with the building later becoming the Hong Kong Restaurant for almost four decades before closing in 2013 and being demolished in 2017.
Organizers handpicked Dubreuil to create the piece. Dubreuil has long-running ties to the site of the mural - while he doesn’t have memories of Milt’s, his parents owned the building for years after Young closed his shop.
“It was nice to be able to give something back to the community, especially here at the site of this building,” he said at the unveiling.
Dubreuil used reference images for the painting from historical sources, including the Flin Flon Heritage Project - trouble is, not many surviving photos of the shop still exist. The base of the mural comes from a 1944 photo of Young standing in front of his shop.
To help bridge gaps for the piece, Dubreuil used stories and recollections from people who went there as inspiration.
“Milt’s was before my time - this was always the Hong Kong, for my entirety. I had to turn to the Flin Flon Heritage Project for stories, for pictures. There weren’t many pictures - we had only two pictures to work off of - so I had to base it all off of stories from people, about the cinnamon buns and the comic books and the hanging out,” said Dubreuil.
“I had a ton of people who came up to me and told me stories about, ‘Oh yeah, we went there after school every day,’ or ‘oh, all the kids were crammed in here’. We even heard a story from a kid getting caught stealing a chocolate bar - he didn’t even get caught, but Milt saw him and told his mom and his mom brought him back here to pay for it - he said he never stole again.”
Dubreuil said he hopes more art or murals will come to the Main Street area - several former building sites and storefronts along the street are now vacant, the buildings once located there long since bulldozed.
“I’m honoured to be asked to do something like this. I hope to see more of this in this community. It really needs it - we have a lot of open spaces that could use a little freshening up,” he said.
