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

People treat Walt Disney as a California invention.

He was born in this house.

Walter Elias Disney arrived on 5 December 1901 at 1249 Tripp Avenue, on Chicago's West Side.

A citywide renumbering in 1909 turned the number into 2156 North Tripp Avenue.

Elias Disney, a carpenter who had worked on buildings for the 1893 World's Fair, put the cottage up in the early 1890s.

Flora Call Disney drew the plans.

The frame house measured roughly eighteen feet by twenty-eight feet.

Roy Oliver Disney had already been born here in 1893. Ruth followed in 1903.

The family left for a farm outside Marceline, Missouri, in April 1906.

Elias sold the Chicago house that season after deciding the neighborhood was no place to raise the children.

The cottage later lost its porch, took aluminum siding, and was split into apartments.

In 2013 Dina Benadon and Brent Young bought it and began a restoration toward the clapboard and trim Roy remembered: white walls with grey-blue paint.

The Walt Disney Company later pledged money toward a childhood-creativity project on the lot.

Scheduled tours have been offered. It is no longer an ordinary private house.

The pin is the restored cottage at the southwest corner of Tripp and Palmer, in Hermosa.

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

Portrait: Boy Scouts of America, 1946, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.