Biography | Walt Disney — The Cottage on Tripp Avenue Where He Was Born

People treat Marceline, Missouri, as the start of Walt Disney.

He was born in this Chicago cottage.

Walter Elias Disney was born on 5 December 1901 on the second floor of the house his parents built at what was then 1249 Tripp Avenue, in the Hermosa neighborhood.

Elias Disney bought the corner lot on 31 October 1891.

On 23 November 1892 he took a permit for a two-story wood cottage eighteen by twenty-eight feet, budgeted at eight hundred dollars.

Flora Disney drew the plans. Elias built the house.

The family moved in during early 1893. Roy Oliver Disney was born here on 24 June 1893.

Walt followed eight years later. A sister, Ruth, was born in the same house on 6 December 1903.

Chicago renumbered the street in 1909. The standing address is 2156 North Tripp Avenue.

Elias also built St. Paul's Congregational Church around the corner at 2255 North Keeler Avenue. A baptism record for Walter Elias is held at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.

Elias sold the property on 10 February 1906 and took the family to a farm outside Marceline. Walt was four.

The farm years are the ones he later mined for Main Street. The birth was here.

A later owner blocked a 1991 landmark designation. In 2013 new owners bought the cottage to restore it as the Walt Disney Birthplace.

The house opened to the public during Open House Chicago on 14 and 15 October 2023.

OpenStreetMap now tags the building as a museum. It is still a small wood house on a residential corner, not a theme-park façade.

A visitor finds a restored porch and a street the city marked Honorary Disney Family Avenue. The second-floor room is the origin, not the brand.

Photo: WaltDisneyBirthplace, 2 August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.