Disney’s First Offices in Los Angeles Are Hiding in Plain Sight

LOS ANGELES — To most passers-by, there isn’t much reason to pause at the flat-roofed building in Los Feliz that houses a skateboard shop and a photocopy store, with its black awnings and gray stucco exterior.

Unless, that is, you spot a clue to the building’s rich history, plastered to one of its tinted windows: a poster of Mickey Mouse.

The plain building on Kingswell Avenue, in the charming neighborhood below the Griffith Observatory, once held the offices of Walt Disney’s animation company. In 1923, exactly 100 years ago, Disney and his brother Roy moved their fledgling operation from their uncle’s garage in Los Feliz to the back of this building, which was a real estate office at the time.

“It’s like a true California start-up story,” said Ben Proudfoot, a filmmaker who now rents the upstairs level of the building, just off busy Vermont Avenue, for his production studio. “It’s powerful to remember that the world’s largest entertainment company started in this corner unit.”

In August 1923, a 21-year-old Walt Disney moved from Kansas City to Los Angeles “with $40 in my pocket and a coat and a pair of trousers that didn’t match.” He had been working for a few years in drawing and animation and hoped to become a movie director in Hollywood, but he couldn’t find the kind of work he was looking for.

“One half of my suitcase had my shirts and underwear and things and the other half had my drawing materials,” Disney was quoted as saying, according to the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. “I would have liked to have been a director, [but] before I knew it I had my drawing board out. I started back at the cartoons.”

Disney quickly sold the “Alice Comedies,” a series of shorts that mixed animation and live action, to a national distributor. The success allowed Walt and Roy to move in October 1923 from their uncle’s garage into the Kingswell Avenue offices. Three years later they moved again, to a much larger studio about a mile away on Hyperion Avenue.

At the Disney museum in the Presidio of San Francisco, one room is covered in photos and mementos of the early days of the Disney Brothers Studio on Kingswell. A black-and-white image captures Walt and Roy, both lanky and wearing berets, standing outside the studio in 1924. Handwritten letters between the brothers are stamped with the Kingswell Avenue address. A gag photo of the studio’s staff shows the team assembled in front of the glass storefront, pretending to pour liquor into one another’s mouths. (Prohibition was going strong at the time.)

Disney met his wife at the offices, after the company hired her to work as an inker who traced the animators’ drawings onto celluloid sheets to be photographed for production. “They almost immediately started a courtship that led to their marriage,” Kirsten Komoroske, executive director of the museum, told me.

Despite its history, the Kingswell building is not protected by any historical designation, which means that it could one day be torn down. The studio on Hyperion Avenue was demolished in the 1960s, Komoroske said, and the site is now a shopping center, with a commemorative plaque on a lamppost outside.

Marine Ter-Pogosyan, who owns the copy store that is now in the Kingswell building, has taken up the mantle of preserving Disney’s legacy in Los Feliz.

She taped the Mickey Mouse poster to her window. Above her store’s bulky industrial copier is a brightly colored mural of the seven dwarfs from “Snow White.” Tacked to the walls of the cramped store are images of Pluto, Donald Duck and Mickey, as well as black-and-white photos from Disney’s life in the neighborhood.

Over the hum of copiers, Ter-Pogosyan told me, “I didn’t know about him or his family, but I’m trying to keep it so everyone knows this was Walt Disney’s first studio.”

What you get

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Where we’re traveling

Today’s tip comes from Alan Brooker, who lives in El Dorado Hills. Alan recommends a getaway to Marshall, a small community in Marin County:

“For us, it’s the gateway to great hiking in Point Reyes, seeing the elk herds, often coyotes. Having a cabin on Tomales Bay, a breathtaking sunset each evening, enjoying the freshest of Hog Island oysters for dinner, falling asleep to the sloshing as the tide comes under your deck — it’s heaven.”

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