Biography | Walt Disney — The Second-Floor Studio That Went Bankrupt Here

People treat Mickey Mouse as a Hollywood idea.

The first professional studio Walt Disney ran was here, on the second floor of the McConahay Building at 1127 East 31st Street in Kansas City.

Laugh-O-gram Films was incorporated on 23 May 1922.

Nelle E. Peters had just finished the two-story tapestry-brick block. Disney took five rooms on the west end of the second floor.

He raised about 15,000 dollars from local backers and hired a small staff of young artists, among them Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng.

The company signed Pictorial Clubs to six cartoon fairy tales and then waited for money that did not arrive.

Disney gave up his apartment and slept in the studio. He ate on credit at the Forest Inn Cafe on the ground floor.

The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, listed 22 May 1978.

Thank You Walt Disney, a Kansas City nonprofit, later bought the block to keep it from demolition and has been restoring it as an animation workshop and small museum.

The rooms upstairs are the point. This is where the first company failed, and where he left for California in 1923 with an unfinished Alice reel in his luggage.

Photo: Mwkruse, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.