Biography | Card Walker — The Hyperion Lot Where a Traffic Boy Learned the Studio

The address on the plaque is 2719 Hyperion Avenue.

In 1938 that was Walt Disney's studio, not a grocery aisle.

Walker arrived from UCLA as a traffic boy.

He carried drawings from room to room so he would learn who sat where and what each department actually did.

Walt thought the mailroom was the fastest map of the lot.

The lot was already a warren.

Animation, ink and paint, a camera department, a sound stage, and the shorts unit shared a block between Griffith Park Boulevard and Monon Street.

Walker moved from the mailbag into camera, then into unit management on short subjects.

In 1941 the Navy took him out of the building for the war.

The studio itself did not last on this corner.

Disney left Hyperion for Burbank in 1940.

The remaining buildings came down in 1966.

Los Angeles declared the site Historic-Cultural Monument No. 163 in 1976.

A weathered plaque still names the old address at the intersection with Griffith Park Boulevard.

Gelson's Market occupies the ground a visitor finds now.

The 1929 photograph on this pin shows the courtyard nine years before Walker punched in.

It is the same lot.

The supermarket checkout is the honest present tense.

From this demolished block he learned the company he would later run.

Photo: Walt Disney Studios, unknown photographer, 1929, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons