Biography | Walt Disney — The Second Floor of the McConahay Building Where Laugh-O-Gram Folded

People date the Disney company from a Hollywood garage in 1923. The first incorporated studio was here, on the second floor of the McConahay Building at 1127 East 31st Street, Kansas City. Walt Disney incorporated Laugh-O-Gram Films on 23 May 1922. He was twenty. The two-story tapestry-brick building had just been finished that year to plans by the architect Nelle E. Peters. Laugh-O-Gram took a five-room suite upstairs. The staff he assembled included Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng — names that later filled the credits of Hollywood animation. The company produced fairy-tale shorts and the live-action-and-cartoon reel Alice's Wonderland on this floor. A Pictorial Clubs distribution contract that was supposed to pay did not pay enough. By early 1923 the rent was in arrears. Disney slept in the office, ate from cans, and paid a dime for a shower at Union Station. Laugh-O-Gram filed for bankruptcy in July 1923. National Archives still holds the case file for the Western District of Missouri. Disney left Kansas City that summer with unfinished Alice footage and very little cash. In California he and Roy incorporated the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. Several of the Kansas City crew followed. The McConahay Building later came close to demolition. The nonprofit Thank You Walt Disney, Inc., bought time for the shell and has been stabilizing it as a future animation workshop and museum. The second floor is not a working studio today. It is the room in which the first Disney company learned, at cost, how a cartoon business fails. Photo: Boy Scouts of America, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, 1946)