Biography | Walt Disney — The Second-Floor Room on Tripp Avenue Where He Was Born

People treat Walt Disney as a California studio and a castle in Anaheim. The first room was a carpenter's cottage on Chicago's West Side. Walter Elias Disney was born here on 5 December 1901, in a second-floor bedroom of the house his parents built at what is now 2156 North Tripp Avenue, in Hermosa. The city later renumbered the street. In 1901 the address was 1249 Tripp Avenue. Elias Disney bought the lot in 1891. On 23 November 1892 he took a permit to raise a two-story wood cottage, 18 by 28 feet, for 800 dollars. Flora Disney drew the plans. Elias, who had worked as a carpenter on the 1893 World's Fair, built much of it himself. Roy Oliver Disney was born in the same house on 24 June 1893. Ruth followed in 1903. Four of the five children started life in these rooms. Roy later remembered the clapboard as white with blue-grey trim and an apple tree in the yard. The family sold the house on 10 February 1906 and left for a farm outside Marceline, Missouri, that April. Walt was four. Later owners altered the cottage. A basement was added. Windows moved. In 1991 the city tried to landmark it; the then-owner blocked the designation. Dina Benadon and Brent Young bought the house in 2013 and began a restoration as The Walt Disney Birthplace. The Walt Disney Company pledged 250,000 dollars in 2016. Guided tours now run on scheduled days. The pin is the house itself, at the southwest corner of North Tripp and West Palmer, on a block the city has tagged Honorary Disney Family Avenue. What happened here was ordinary and specific: a minister of no congregation, a carpenter, and a mother who drafted houses produced a boy who would spend the rest of his life drawing rooms people could walk into. Photo: NASA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of Disney in 1954; the cottage on Tripp Avenue is the site, not the picture.