Biography | Walt Disney — The Lot on Hyperion Avenue That Replaced the Real Estate Office

People treat the Disney studio as the Burbank lot across from a hospital. The work that made the company was done on this block of Hyperion Avenue, now a grocery and a parking lot. On 6 July 1925 Walt and Roy Disney put 400 dollars down on a plot between Griffith Park Boulevard and Monon Street. A one-story building of about 1,600 square feet went up at 2719 Hyperion Avenue. They moved from the rented rooms at 4649 and 4651 Kingswell Avenue in early 1926. The name on the door changed from Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio to Walt Disney Studio. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was drawn here. So was Mickey Mouse. Steamboat Willie, with synchronized sound, reached the Colony Theatre in New York on 18 November 1928. The drawings had been made on this lot. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was produced here and premiered at Carthay Circle on 21 December 1937. By then the site had grown into a warren of ink-and-paint rooms, a sound stage, and an animation school. In June 1938 the brothers put 10,000 dollars down on fifty-one acres in Burbank. The move finished in 1940. A few Hyperion buildings were hauled to the new lot. The rest were leveled around 1966. The City of Los Angeles declared the site Historic-Cultural Monument 163 on 6 October 1976. A marker stands near the intersection. Gelson's Market uses 2725 Hyperion as its address. The archive number is 2719. Stand in the parking lot and you are on the footprint, not in a surviving studio. The clean rooms and the multiplane camera are gone. What remains is the fact of the work: a Midwestern cartoonist and his older brother rented, then bought, enough floor to put a mouse on a steamboat and a feature on a screen. Photo: Agence Meurisse / Bibliotheque nationale de France, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Disney in Paris in 1935, during the Hyperion years.