Beer Can House Has Become An Interesting Site for Fascinated Tourists

John Milkovisch grew up during the great depression, where he developed the habit of not throwing anything away, including empty beer cans, which he began using to wallpaper his home in the early 1970s, according to the Associated Press.

Milkovisch and his wife enjoyed a can of beer every afternoon, and he began to use the empty, flattened cans to wallpaper the house, carefully cutting and flattening each can.

"The funny thing is that it wasn't...to attract attention," Ruben Guevara, the head of restoration and preservation of the Beer Can House in Houston's Memorial Park, said. "He said himself that if there was a house similar to this a block away, he wouldn't take the time to go look at it.

"He had no idea what was the fascination about what he was doing," Guevara continued.

After Milkovisch passed away in the mid-1980s, his sons would periodically replace rusty steel cans with new ones, as well as restoring a wall destroyed by a hurricane. There were so many people gawking at the house that they put up a fence due to concern for their mother, Mary, who still lived in the house. They embedded beer cans in the fence as well.

Mary Milkovisch died in the mid-1990s, and the neighborhood underwent a transformation, going from a working middle-class area to an upper-class area. The house, however, remains a well-known site.

A local nonprofit organization, the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, bought the property approximately 10 years ago and began restoring the house, later opening it to the public.

"It shows the human nature of the individual is supreme," Patrick Louque, a Houston resident who lived in the neighborhood while Milkovisch was putting up the beer can wallpaper. "You can take the simplest thing, and it can actually affect a lot of other people.

"It totally grabbed me, and it's probably totally grabbed the imagination of more people than I could possibly imagine," Louque continued.

The center estimates that 50,000 cans are on the house.

"The front of the house, when that went up, that's when all the buzz began," Guevara said, referring to the cans that line the entire front porch, including the door.