Blog History: Walt Disney in Silver Lake

When you go to the back of the Hollywood Pictures Backlot in the theme park California Adventures, you see a movie theater sign “Hyperion.” A Disney book publisher “Hyperion” is named after the street where the Walt Disney Studio was located from 1925 to 1940. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Books.

Gelson's supermarket stands towards the back of what had been the Hyperion studio. Inside Gelson's is a photograph of the Hyperion Disney studio during the Golden Age of Animation shot from about where Trader Joe's now stands, but which was then an empty lot.

In 1923, Roy Disney moved out to California because he had tuberculosis and stayed with their uncle in a modest house at 4406 Kingswell Avenue. Walt followed his brother and, for a time, they worked on an animation rig in the garage. Shortly after that, they opened a studio in a realtor's office a couple of blocks away at 4651 Kingswell. This is now the address for Una Mae's. Then they moved to 4649 Kingswell (now “Extra Copy”).

In 1925, they put $300 down for the lot – with an office on it and a gas station on a corner on Hyperion. A few years after that, they built matching Tudor-style houses on Lyric near Marshall High School and moved out of their rented apartments.

Disney produced the first synchronized sound cartoon “Steamboat Willie,” starring Micky Mouse--Walt himself was Micky's voice until 1947--in the Hyperion studio. From 1934 to 1937, he produced “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” there. The animators used small houses behind the studio as models for the Dwarfs' cottages.

The film produced at the unheard cost of $1,499,000 during the depths of the Depression

The studio exploded. Disney built out the lot and expanded into the neighborhood.

In 1940, the studio moved to Burbank, moving some of the buildings to the Burbank lot.

(Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination)

The Hub Mart used to be housed by the Trader Joe's building on Hyperion across the street from the Walt Disney studio. The building was constructed in 1936.

The ceilings were way high up, the meat counter was stuck in front; the cigar and comic book stand–-where I spent delicious moments as a child reading Superman comics until a man with a cigar chased me out--was on another side. It looked only a little like the other supermarkets, which had grown out of produce stands open to the street.

What the Hub looked like was a sound studio. Chain of title documents do not show that Roy or Walt owned the lot but leases do not show up in recorded documents. (Email message 8/2/11 from Greg Lane, Lawyers Title, in Burbank.)