Biography | Roy O. Disney — The Cottage on Tripp Avenue Where He Was Born First

People come to 2156 North Tripp Avenue looking for Walt. The cottage was already eight years old when Walter Elias Disney was born in an upstairs room on 5 December 1901. Roy Oliver Disney arrived here first, on 24 June 1893. Elias Disney, a carpenter drawn to Chicago by work around the World's Columbian Exposition, bought the lot in 1891. He took a building permit in November 1892 for an eighteen-by-twenty-eight-foot wood cottage that cost eight hundred dollars. Flora Call Disney drew the plans. Elias, Flora, and their two older sons, Herbert and Raymond, moved in early in 1893. Roy was born that June. The address on the permit was 1249 Tripp Avenue. Chicago later renumbered the street; the same lot is 2156 North Tripp today. Three Disney children were born under this roof: Roy, Walt, and Ruth. Herbert and Raymond were already in the house when the family settled here. Roy and Walt later shared the smaller of the two upstairs bedrooms. The family sold the house in 1906 and left for a farm in Marceline, Missouri. Decades of alterations followed: the porch came off, aluminum siding went on, and the cottage was split into apartments. It is now restored as the Walt Disney Birthplace, a house museum that opens on scheduled tour days rather than as a private home. The pin is the lot itself. Stand on the sidewalk and the story is not the later theme parks. It is a carpenter's cottage in Hermosa, and the first of the two brothers who would keep a studio alive from a rented back room. Photo: WaltDisneyBirthplace, via Wikimedia Commons