Biography | Walt Disney — The Lot on Hyperion Where Snow White Was Drawn

People treat Burbank as the place Disney learned to make features.

The first feature was drawn on this lot.

On 6 July 1925 Walt and Roy Disney put four hundred dollars down on Lot 21, Block 18, of the Ivanhoe Tract on Hyperion Avenue in what is now Silver Lake.

A further six hundred dollars closed the purchase in August.

By mid-January 1926 a wood-frame shop thirty-two by thirty-eight feet was going up: two offices, a camera room, animators on one side of a partition and ink-and-paint on the other.

The staff moved from Kingswell Avenue that February. The address that stuck was 2719 Hyperion.

The last Alice comedies, the Oswald shorts, Steamboat Willie, the Silly Symphonies, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were made here.

Snow White was the expensive bet. Production ran from 1934 into late 1937 on a lot that had already sprouted an Animators Building, a sound stage, a Shorts Building, and a Features Building.

Contemporary reports put the negative cost near one and a half million dollars. The film opened at the Carthay Circle on 21 December 1937.

Snow White receipts paid for the next campus. On 31 August 1938 the brothers put a deposit on fifty-one acres by Buena Vista Street in Burbank.

The general move off Hyperion ran from 26 December 1939 to 5 January 1940.

The remaining Hyperion buildings were demolished in 1966, the same year Walt died.

Los Angeles declared the site Historic-Cultural Monument 163 on 6 October 1976. The standing address on the supermarket is 2725 Hyperion Avenue.

A visitor finds a Gelson's parking lot and a marker, not a sound stage.

The work that made the company a feature studio happened on this ground.

Photo: Walt Disney Studios, 1929, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The sign on the roof reads Walt Disney Studios, Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony sound cartoons.