Biography | Walt Disney — The Hospital Across Buena Vista Street

On the morning of 15 December 1966 Walt Disney died at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank. He was 65.

The New York Times dated the death to that morning and placed it in this building.

The hospital stands at 501 South Buena Vista Street, across the street from the Disney studio lot.

The Sisters of Providence opened it in 1943. It is now Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center.

A chest X-ray in early November 1966 found a tumor in the left lung. Surgeons here removed a large part of that lung in the first week of November.

He was brought back to the same hospital later that month. Contemporary accounts give the immediate cause as circulatory collapse after the cancer and its treatment.

He was cremated two days after the death. The ashes were placed at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, in a small private garden to the left of the Freedom Mausoleum.

The cryogenic story that attached itself to this hospital in 1967 is a tabloid invention. The funeral arrangements were ordinary and private.

The pin is the hospital, not the studio gate across the street.

Photo: Junkyardsparkle, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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