Artist Dave Gatzmer’s sound barrier phone display is both an art & history museum, 20 feet off the ground.

ST. LOUIS PARK, Minn. — What we see every day, our eyes no longer see. 

Take freeway noise barriers, not even worthy of our passing glances. 

Unless you’re Dave Gatzmer, and a noise barrier calls you.

“There we go,” Dave says to himself, 20 feet up on a ladder, attaching a 1980s corded phone to the back side of a St. Louis Park noise barrier.

With a cordless drill in hand, he’ll repeat the process until several new, old phones occupy formerly vacant space.      

“Ta-da!” Dave says with an air of satisfaction

A few years back, during a road construction project, Dave saw in his neighborhood more than a new sound wall.  

“I saw this new blank canvas,” he says.

The artist grabbed some old phones he had lying around and hung them up.   

Initially, “I put up five,” Dave recalls. 

Those first five phones, occupying the top few feet of the neighborhood side of the noise barrier, have grown to a couple hundred.

They’ve also earned Dave a nickname he didn’t seek, connecting him to the world’s best-known street artist. 

“I’ve been coined ‘Phone Banksy,’” Dave says. Like it or not, the name stuck.

Across the street from the sound barrier, inside the basement of his home, Dave preps more phones for hanging. Receivers are glued in place, and metal strapping is screwed to the backs of phones to make them easier to mount.    

Spring has brought Dave a bumper crop.

“Some lady found me on Facebook,” he says, holding up a brand-new corded phone, still in the box, and destined for the wall.

“She, like, really wants this up there,” Dave says. So, of course, “Up it goes.”

Dave has never paid for a phone; his art project grows only through phone donations.

Dave reaches down to pick up a piece of plywood, onto which several phones are mounted.

“One of my friends came — this was his Halloween costume,” Dave says with a laugh. “Yeah, he came as my wall.”

The basement is a festival of oddities, and not just random old phones. Dave is surrounded by odd knick-knacks and photos, many of them his own creations.

“Yeah, I’m a weirdo,” he confesses with a hearty laugh.

Unsure others would be equally enamored of his sense of humor, Dave started out hanging phones anonymously.

“I was sneaking over here at night doing it,” he says, now back at the wall.  

After a time, Phone Banksy came to a revelation. 

“If you’ve got a pizza box or a ladder, people just let you go anywhere you want,” he says with a laugh.

After some initial pushback, Dave now has the blessing of both the city of St. Louis Park and the state of Minnesota to display his phones as public art above the Cedar Lake LRT Regional Trail that runs next to the noise barrier.

He also has Louie Schopper’s blessing.

“We check out the phones, like, every day,” Randi Schopper, the toddler’s mother, says.

 Randi points to a phone shaped like a motorcycle. 

“That’s his favorite,” she says.

“R2-D2 is pretty cool,” he says, pointing to a Star Wars-themed phone.

“There’s a piano phone,” Dave adds as he continues his walk along the wall.

He points to phones resembling footballs, high-heeled shoes, and Legos.

“I like this yellow donut phone,” Dave says, pointing to a model with a 70s vibe.       

In that, the wall serves as a museum of both art and history, harkening back to a time when having a mobile phone meant attaching a 15-foot cord. 

Sixth-grader Julien Munson stops beneath the wall of phones while on a bike ride with his eighth-grade sister Delphine.

He pulls from his pocket an iPhone 17.

Julien has never used a rotary phone, nor has his sister.

“No, never,” Delphine says when asked.  

Neither will ever experience a good receiver slamming to end a call with a pesky telemarketer.

“Boom!” says Dave as he makes a slamming motion. “It just makes you feel better.”

Yet, Julien and Delphine needn’t have experienced the phones to appreciate them. 

“I like how they’re all up there and they’re not in a landfill somewhere,” Delphine says.

Good news, kids. Dave is collecting more.

Mounted to the wall, at a more reasonable height, is a metal box Dave installed for donations.

“It’s been overflowing, and there’s been bags of phones,” he says. “As long as they keep coming, I’ll keep putting them up.”

Dave Gatzmer is a man who’s found his calling.

Editor’s note: Dave Gatzmer’s sound barrier art project is located at the Highway 100 & Highway 7 interchange, just west of Carpenter Park, in St. Louis Park. You can contact Dave on his social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.