With iridescent platinum decor dripped across Disneyland, the Disney100 celebration has officially launched. Commemorating “100 Years of Wonder” (since the 1923 founding of The Walt Disney Studios), Disney100 is something more than another entry in Disney’s tradition of annual theme park campaigns; it’s a company-wide initiative meant to reflect on Disney’s past and re-orient it toward a new tomorrow.
Of course, born in the era of recently-former CEO Bob Chapek’s franchise-focused era of cost-cutting, slashed perks, and new upcharges, it’s worth stepping back from the modern, mega-sized standard of the Walt Disney Company and remembering how it all started.
Looking beyond the theme parks, there’s much to see, celebrate, and support as we reflect on the first century of Disney, and hopefully our cross-country road trip of historic Disney destinations might spark some bucket list additions for you… Pack a suitcase and let’s hit the road, looking for the places that made the man who made the mouse.
1. Walt Disney Birthplace (Chicago, Illinois)
Just Northwest of downtown Chicago – in the quiet, working class Hermosa neighborhood, right on the corner of Tripp Avenue and Palmer Street – stands an otherwise unassuming family home. But despite its simple appearance, the house at 2156 N Tripp Ave. was designed and built by Flora and Elias Disney. Costing $800 in 1893 (no small investment when Elias made about $1 a day), the young couple with their sons Herbert and Raymond moved in early 1893. That summer, their third child, Roy, was born. And on December 5, 1901, right in the upstairs bedroom, Walt was born.
After their fifth child (and first daughter) Ruth was born, the Disney family left Chicago and headed 400 miles away to the quiet town of Marceline, Missouri. The house Flora and Elias built passed through many hands in the century since. As you’d expect, the home was subject to frequent upgrades and redesigns that altered its layout, its porches, its windows, and (of course) its interior. Even still, in 1991 the City of Chicago attempted to have the home registered as a historic landmark, but its then-owners resisted. By the 2010s, the old home was surely heading for the wrecking ball…
But in 2013, Dina Benadon and Brent Young (co-founders of themed entertainment design firm Super 78) purchased the home for $169,000. Through a grant from Disney and crowdsource funding, they raised the money needed to begin restoration of the home to its 1901 state, as explored in Brooke McDonald’s wonderful reflection on the effort. Today, the Walt Disney Birthplace looks a whole lot like the home Walt was born in, inside and out. Tours happen occasionally, as do special events (with Mickey himself visiting in the past). Plans call for a museum and creativity-focused non-profit to make their way to the neighborhood. And if you’re in the Chicago area, it’s worth standing outside the fence and looking at Elias’ handiwork firsthand.
2. “The Real Main Street U.S.A.” and Walt Disney Hometown Museum (Marceline, Missouri)
With a population of just over 2,500 in 1900 (and about the same today), Marceline, Missouri is a town that’s probably been mentioned more often than visited. That’s because it’s often said that Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. is a dreamy, rose-colored interpretation of Walt’s memories of the town – where he lived from ages 4 to 8.
(It’s probably indirectly true that Main Street resembles a turn-of-the-century Marceline, but the truth is that Disneyland’s entry land is a stylized, idealized pastiche of many turn-of-the-century, Midwestern American towns. Many designers contributed to its final form, crafting a sweet, historic-yet-romantic interpretation that could indeed look a lot like Walt’s memories of Marceline, but is pretty certainly not just Marceline.)
In any case, the town’s long-running connection to Walt is very evident. A hand-painted “Main Street U.S.A.” mural resides on Kansas Ave. (honorarily named Main Street U.S.A. as it passes through downtown); around town, you can find the Walt Disney Municipal Park, Walt Disney Post Office, and even Walt Disney Elementary (home of the “Disney Dolphins”).
You can also visit the Disney Family Farm’s barn, where Disney fans are encouraged to sign their name in the barn’s interior. Beyond the barn, you’ll also find Walt’s legendary “Dreaming Tree” (being recreated in Disneyland’s new Toontown).
But the main attraction must be the Walt Disney Hometown Museum, constructed in the old Santa Fe Railroad Depot downtown. Open seasonally, the museum features many relics from Walt’s childhood donated by his sister, Ruth, such as letters between Walt and his family, his original school desk, and more. The museum also features one of the original cars from Disneyland’s Midget Autopia.
When the original Autopia Autopia closed in 1966, Walt actually had the ride’s vehicles donated to Marceline, and the town rebuilt and operated the ride until 1977! (You can still see the ride’s tracks in Walt Disney Municipal Park, where the load station is used as a picnic shelter.) A 2015 fundraising effort hoping to bring the ride back to life on a new site near the museum unfortunately did not succeed. Even still, it’s wonderful to see a real piece of Disneyland history back in Walt’s hometown.
3. Laugh-o-Gram Studio (Kansas City, Missouri)
In 1921, a 19-year-old Walt Disney moved to the big city of Kansas (population 340,000) and founded Laugh-o-Gram Studio on the second floor of the McConahay Building. There, the young cartoonist hired Ub Iwerks (with whom he’d eventually develop the character of Mickey Mouse) and was quickly commissioned to create animated cartoon shorts to play before the features at local movie theaters.
One of the last outputs from the Laugh-o-Gram campus was the first of the iconic “Alice Comedies” – early animated shorts that placed a live action Alice (Virginia Davis) into an animated Wonderland. (Walt himself also claimed that his fondness for the mice that often scurried around the Kansas City studio’s drawing tables might’ve been a spark leading the design of Mickey Mouse years later.)
Obviously, Disney stay in Kansas City. But even though the McConahay Building was placed on the National Register of Historic Landmarks in 1978, that only protected the building where a young Walt had gotten his start from demolition; it didn’t save it from neglect. The building was collapsing in a state of disrepair in the late 20th century. In 1995, a non-profit called Thank You Walt Disney was founded to celebrate Walt’s time in Kansas City, and ultimately to save the former home of Laugh-o-Gram.
With funding from the Disney family, Thank You Walt Disney Inc. is in the process of rehabilitating the old McConahay building and constructing within it a theater showing Laugh-o-Gram-produced shorts as well as a museum space exploring Walt’s early Kansas animation. The future plans of the non-profit include using the building as a digital media maker space, an animation-focused lecture hall, and a flexible workspace.
Unfortunately, Laugh-o-Gram didn’t last long. Walt declared bankruptcy in 1923. Of course, you may recognize 1923 as being exactly a century ago… Yep, the start of the Disney100 campaign was the end of Laugh-o-Gram. After all, the penniless Walt decided to start over by hopping a train to California, which takes our roadtrip west… Read on…!
4. Los(t) Angeles Landmarks (Los Angeles, California)
The Los Angeles that Walt Disney arrived in in summer 1923 looked a whole lot different than the one we know today… Unfortunately, many of the real Los Angeles landmarks of Walt’s time are long gone. The city’s rapid expansion has seen so much of historic Hollywood demolished, and icons of Walt Disney’s life and legacy left unpreserved.
For example, in October 1923, Walt moved into the back half of a real estate office at 4651 Kingswell Ave, renting out the back half of a real estate office. By the end of the year, he’d made enough money to rent the vacant space next door to the real estate office at 4649 Kingswell Ave. – the first official home of the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio.
Today, the space has been subdivided into a skate shop and a print shop, both of which are used to Disney fans coming in for Mickey tattoos and prints. (The Kingswell Camera Shop on Disney California Adventure’s Buena Vista Street pays tribute to to this original studio.)
Walt and company outgrew the space on Kingswell quickly, and in 1926, upgraded to the “Hyperion Studio” as The Walt Disney Studio at 2701 Hyperion Ave. This iconic campus grew and expanded a lot between 1926 and 1940, and served as the place where everything from Steamboat Willie to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were animated. Disney moved to its current Burbank location in 1940.
Today, a supermarket sits where the Hyperion Studio once did. (My build-out concept for Disney’s Hollywood Studios includes recreating this studio as one of the park’s lands!)
Perhaps the ultimate landmark of Walt’s early Hollywood history, the Carthay Circle Theater is one of the most iconic of Los Angeles’ historic movie palaces. Built in 1926, the theater – with its iconic Spanish-style octagonal bell tower and its circular auditorium – was located at 6316 San Vicente Boulevard. Commissioned by developer J. Harvey McCarthy to put his Carthay Circle neighborhood on the map, the theater debuted countless classics over its lifetime, but none more important to Disney than 1939’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – the first full-length animated film, and a tremendous risk for Walt.
The Carthay Circle Theater was demolished in 1969. A small, scale model was built along the Sunset Blvd. streetscape of Disney’s Hollywood Studios in 1994, with a full-scale recreation serving as the park icon of Disney California Adventure upon its relaunch in 2012. In its place stands an office building. Long story short: if you’re touring Los Angeles for icons of Walt’s time or history, prepare to see a lot of urban sprawl.
More to the point, you’re better off finding Los Angeles icons of Walt’s time recreated in Disney Parks than in the real world!
5. Walt Disney’s Carolwood Barn (Los Angeles, California)
You don’t have to read very far into Walt Disney’s life to know that after his wife Lillian, his next greatest love was probably trains. In fact, the miniature, 1/8 scale, steam-powered “Carolwood Pacific Railroad” (above) Walt built in his own backyard in 1950 likely inspired his plans for a Mickey Mouse Park, which eventually grew into Disneyland!
Located in the iconic Griffith Park in Los Angeles, Walt Disney’s Carolwood Barn is dedicated to Walt Disney’s railroading legacy in part by “encouraging the continual appreciation of railroading.”
Operated by the Carolwood Foundation on behalf of the Walt Disney Family Foundation, the Carolwood Barn is generally open every third Sunday of the month in the early afternoon. The mini museum includes many artifacts from Walt’s time, donations from his close friends, and pieces of Walt’s own train collection including the Carolwood Pacific and the full-sized combine of the Retlaw 1 train that ran at Disneyland from 1955 to 1974.
6. Walt Disney Family Museum (San Francisco, California)
Aside from Disneyland itself, there’s really no more of a Mecca for Disney Parks fans than the Walt Disney Family Museum, located in San Francisco’s Presidio. Founded by Diane Disney Miller (Walt’s daughter), the Museum is not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company but instead is a standalone nonprofit dedicated to telling the story of Walt’s life and career.
At 40,000 square feet, the exhibit features ten main galleries, starting with “Early Beginnings” and “The Move to Hollywood” and concluding with “Disneyland & Beyond” and “Remembering Walt Disney.” The Diane Disney Miller Exhibition Hall provides a space for major temporary exhibitions focused on particular films, filmmakers, animators, artists, or aspects of Walt’s life drawn from the archives.
Throughout the galleries, there are also interactives allowing guests to experiment with synchronized sound, color, animation, Audio-Animatronics, and more. Now overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge (from second floor of the museum’s enviable real estate) is the very bench from Griffith Park where Walt once sat, watching his daughters on the carousel and envisioning a place “where parents and their children could have fun together.” (See me, on that bench, above!)
Interactive, colorful, emotional, and filled with artifacts, the Walt Disney Family Museum includes opportunities to see Walt Disney’s personal Academy Award collection, the earliest known sketches of Oswald and Mickey Mouse, one of three surviving multi-plane cameras, and the Lilly Belle train (the sister to the Carolwood Pacific).
All that said, the centerpiece of the museum for many Disney Parks fans is a 12-foot wide model of Disneyland as it existed in Walt’s imagination. A dreamy, mid-century interpretation of the park as Walt expected it to exist in the late ’60s – complete with New Orleans Square, New Tomorrowland, and Space Mountain. The walkthrough ends in a gallery filled with the world’s condolences for the loss of Walt Disney on December 15, 1966. Altogether, it makes the Walt Disney Family Museum an experience that will leave even those without an engrained affinity for Walt feeling emotional. And more to the point, it helps to turn Walt Disney from a legendary media figure and often-cited corporate namesake into a person; a real person whose spark really did change the world… Speaking of which…
7. Disney100: The Exhibition (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Having made our way west – from Chicago to Marceline; Kansas City to Los Angeles; Anaheim to San Francisco – our cross-country roadtrip through Walt’s story now zooms back East to a landmark that’s quickly made its way to the top of many Parks fans’ bucket lists.
Debuting at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute science center, Disney100: The Exhibition will serve as a definitive encapsulation of Disney’s first century. The 15,000 square foot experience is organized by nearly every branch of The Walt Disney Company, including contributions from Walt Disney Imagineering, D23, Disney Animation Research Library, the Walt Disney Archives, Walt Disney Studios, and more…
The exhibit promises over 250 rare artifacts, original artworks, costumes, props and behind-the-scenes memorabilia spread among 10 galleries. Though there’s no doubt that a heavy emphasis will be on Disney Animation and Disney’s modern, ever-expanding portfolio of characters, brands, franchises, stories, and worlds (this was, after all, a celebration engineered by former CEO Bob Chapek) promises of tributes to Disney’s parks and – of course – to Walt himself make the Disney100 Exhibition a nice last stop on our trip.
There’s no doubt that this experience will be a spectacular bookend to Disney’s first hundred years; a celebration of everything that Disney represents today.
But hopefully, our Disney100 Road Trip to off-the-beaten-path, historic, even “unofficial” locales in Disney’s history serves as a reminder that even before Mickey, it all with the real story of a real person shaped by the real places and people of his time. These are the places that made the man who made the mouse. And if you’ve got a bucket list, these places might just deserve a spot on it…
