Biography | Walt Disney — The Second-Floor Rooms on East 31st Where the First Studio Failed

People treat Hollywood as the place Disney learned to make cartoons.

He learned it here, then went broke.

On 23 May 1922, at age twenty, Walt Disney incorporated Laugh-O-Gram Films with local investors in Kansas City.

He rented five rooms on the second floor of the new McConahay Building at 1127 East 31st Street, a two-story brick block designed by Nelle E. Peters.

The staff included Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng — names that later ran other studios.

They modernized fairy tales as one-reel silent cartoons: Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, The Four Musicians of Bremen.

A Tennessee distributor, Pictorial Clubs, signed for a series and did not pay.

Disney gave up his apartment and slept in the office.

In July 1923 the company filed for bankruptcy. He left for California with unfinished live-action footage of a child named Virginia Davis walking through a cartoon world, later released as Alice's Wonderland.

The building decayed for decades. Thank You Walt Disney, Inc. bought it in 1996 to stop demolition.

A visitor now finds a structure under restoration, not a working studio.

The second floor is where the work happened.

Photo: Gbleem, 5 September 2004, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: unknown photographer, 1919, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Disney was then a Red Cross ambulance volunteer, three years before this studio.