Walt Disney Was Born in a Modest Chicago Cottage on Tripp Avenue

The man who built the world's most famous entertainment empire was born on December 5, 1901, in an unremarkable two-story house at 2156 N Tripp Avenue in the Hermosa neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side. His father, Elias Disney, had built the home himself. Walt lived here until 1906, when the family moved to Marceline, Missouri — a small town that would later inspire the Main Street USA layout of Disneyland. The Tripp Avenue house became a somewhat overlooked historical site for most of the 20th century. In 2013, Dina Benadon and Brent Young bought it and began a restoration effort, now carried on by the Walt Disney Birthplace nonprofit. Today it is a restored house open for guided tours, with plans for a museum and creativity center still in progress. The house itself is modest: a typical Chicago workers' cottage, remarkable only for what happened there on a December morning in 1901.