Today, it’s a Gelson’s grocery store and a parking lot. But just about a century ago, some of the most iconic and enduring entertainment and intellectual property in the world was created right here at 2719 Hyperion Avenue.
In the Los Angeles neighborhood a few miles west of Downtown that was then called Edendale, and now, Silver Lake, Walt Disney Studio grew as energetically and exponentially as Los Angeles itself.
For Disney, what started as a single-story, 1,600-square-foot space purchased for $1,000 in two installments, soon evolved into a block-long warren of workplaces, including the famous two-story Animator’s Building No. 1, as well as a sound stage, a library, vaults, warehouses, a “Shorts Building,” a “Features Building,” and more. Perhaps the most notable external feature on the property was a large rectangular neon sign affixed to No. 1’s roof, showing Mickey Mouse in stride plus sheet music promoting Silly Symphony, the company’s groundbreaking music-and-animation series.
By 1939, the company had grown so much that it bought 50 acres about five miles away, in Burbank, and moved their operations there the following year. But during those scant Hyperion Avenue years between 1926 and 1940, a veritable armada of as many as 1,500 animators, painters, inkers, and countless other craftspeople created all-time classic works.
To name just a few: Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937), believed to be the first-ever feature-length cartoon; Steamboat Willie (1928); Ferdinand the Bull (1938); and Flowers and Trees (1932), which is believed to be the first-ever color cartoon and which earned an Oscar, as did a Disney cartoon every year that decade. Plus a whole legion of indelible characters made their Disney debuts, ranging from Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, and Goofy, to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and Clarabelle Cow. As a 2006 New York Times story memorably put it, “For a time in the ‘30s the studio was a near-utopian animation academy, a kind of grove of cartooniana.”
Even before Walt and Roy Disney moved to Hyperion, the previously-named Disney Bros. Cartoon Studio was located just over a mile away on 4649 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood. That was the brothers’ third consecutive Kingswell address, as they grew steadily from first working in their uncle’s garage at 4406 Kingswell, and then into a former real estate office at 4651 Kingswell. Their initial project was the Alice Comedies, a series of 56 hybrid live action–animation shorts.
The various Disney locations weren’t too far from the sites of multiple studios from the earliest days of west coast filmmaking, back when the Edendale neighborhood was arguably the original “Hollywood.”
The Hyperion property was demolished in 1966. The site was declared a “point of historical interest” by the city in 1976, and a sign stands there today noting it as Cultural Heritage Board Monument #163. For Angelenos in the know, a more whimsical reminder of what was once here remains around the corner on Griffith Park Boulevard: residential bungalows built in 1931 in the “storybook” style of architecture. Colloquially known as the “Snow White Cottages,” they appear to have been the close model for Dopey and company’s animated domiciles.