Biography | Walt Disney — The Hospital Across Buena Vista Street He Did Not Leave

People look for Walt Disney's last morning on a studio lot. He died here, at St. Joseph's Hospital, 501 South Buena Vista Street in Burbank, on the morning of 15 December 1966. He was sixty-five. The hospital stands directly across Buena Vista Street from the Walt Disney Studios. He had used it before. In November 1966 he was admitted for tests; surgeons removed a tumor from his left lung. Studio publicity first described an old polo injury. The company later acknowledged a serious illness after he returned to the lot in late November. He went back into the hospital and did not come out. Contemporary reports gave the cause as circulatory collapse following the lung disease. The New York Times put the death on its front page the next morning: founder of an entertainment company built on a mouse, dead in this building. The campus is now Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center, still a working hospital. The 1966 patient rooms are not a museum. There is no public marker on the facade for the death. The fact that matters on this sidewalk is the distance. He died within sight of the studio he had run since the 1940s, not in a distant clinic and not on a soundstage. Funeral arrangements were private. He was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale, in a small garden beside the Freedom Mausoleum, a separate pin. Stand on Buena Vista Street and the geography is blunt. The last address was a hospital the staff could walk to from the lot. Photo: Boy Scouts of America, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, 1946)