Biography | Walt Disney — Snow White Was Drawn on This Lot, Now a Grocery Parking Lot

People treat the Walt Disney Studios as the Burbank campus across from a hospital. The lot that made the company was here, at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in Los Feliz. On 6 July 1925 Walt and Roy Disney put 400 dollars down on Lot 21, Block 18 of the Ivanhoe Tract. A 32-by-38-foot wood-frame building went up that winter. By mid-February 1926 the staff had moved from the Kingswell rooms. The address became the letterhead for the last Alice comedies, the Oswald shorts, the first Mickey Mouse films, the Silly Symphonies, and the feature that changed the business: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937. Los Angeles declared the site Historic-Cultural Monument 163 on 6 October 1976. David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives wrote that year to correct a survey that had listed 2725 instead of 2719. The studio buildings themselves are gone. Most were razed for a supermarket. Gelson's Market now occupies the ground, using 2725 Hyperion as its mailing address. A marker still stands near Hyperion and Griffith Park Boulevard. The parking lot is the studio. Photo: NASA, public domain, portrait of Walt Disney, 1954.