The Disney Garage

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am obsessed with all things Disney – especially Disneyland.  I can hardly pass by the “Disneyland Drive” sign on the 5 Freeway without feeling a twitch.  Not surprisingly, whenever I find myself in Orange County, my only interest is visiting the park and spending every waking moment there.  I am definitely a show-up-before-opening-stay-until-closing-and-then-spend-an-extra-hour-on-Main-Street kind of girl.  As such I’ve never really ventured out to do much stalking in the area.  One local spot I’d been dying to see for ages, though, was the Disney Garage, aka Walt Disney’s very first animation studio which is on permanent display at the Stanley Ranch Museum in Garden Grove about two miles south of the Happiest Place on Earth.  I finally got my chance last March thanks to a doctor appointment in the OC that I accompanied my dad to.  While there was not enough time during our quick trip to allow for a Disney day, I made sure to schedule a stop at Stanley Ranch and we headed right on over there upon arriving in town.

I briefly covered the story of the Disney Garage in a May 2014 Scene it Before post for Los Angeles magazine, but a more thorough recap is in order here.  Upon returning home to Missouri after serving in World War I, Walt secured a job at the Kansas City Slide Company which produced both live-action and animated film advertisements.  The work fascinated the 18-year-old and it wasn’t long before he was creating his own animations using a borrowed camera in his father’s garage.  (Garages seem to be a theme in young Walt’s life.)  In 1921, Disney partnered with cartoonist Ub Iwerks and under the label Laugh-O-Gram Films started producing shorts including one about a live-action character named Alice who lived in a cartoon world.  The company failed after less than two years and in July 1923 Walt headed west to Los Angeles, where he rented a room at $5 a week from his uncle Robert who lived at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in Los Feliz.  (That’s Uncle Robert’s house pictured below.)  Of the move, he said, “I packed all of my worldly goods – a pair of trousers, a checkered coat, a lot of drawing materials and the last of the fairy-tale reels we had made – in a kind of frayed cardboard suitcase.  And with that wonderful audacity of youth I went to Hollywood, arriving there with just 40 dollars.”

After a brief stint trying to break into the production world, Walt returned to his original passion, transforming his uncle’s small detached garage into a make-shift animation studio, which Robert charged him an additional $1 a week to use.  Fashioning a cartoon stand out of lumber and plywood boxes, Disney got to work creating cartoon gag reels with the hope that he could sell them to the Pantages Theatre chain to play before movies.  You can check out some historic photos of the garage, which was formerly located down the driveway on the home’s east side, here and here.

The Pantages plan was abandoned when producer Margaret Winkler tapped Disney to create more Alice cartoons (which later became known as the Alice Comedies) in October 1923.  In conjunction with the deal, Walt partnered with his brother, Roy, and moved his studio out of his uncle’s garage and into the back of a real estate office located down the street at 4651 Kingswell Avenue.  By February 1924, the brothers needed more space and secured a lease on the storefront next door at 4649 Kingswell.  Today, that spot, which has since been renumbered 4647, houses a print shop named Extra Copy (pictured below).  It is the Kingswell building that The Walt Disney Company officially recognizes as Walt’s first studio.  He wasn’t there long, though.

A little over a year later, the brothers put down a deposit on some vacant land on Hyperion Avenue in Los Feliz and proceeded to build a small single-story studio which they moved into in January 1926.  As the company grew, so did the space.  In his book The Art of Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms, Christopher Finch says, “It was constantly being expanded.”  (Sadly, that site was torn down in 1966 and a Gelson’s Market currently stands in its place.)  The brothers eventually ran out of room to expand any further at that location and switched their sights to Burbank where they purchased 51 acres and began construction on a much larger studio.  The company moved to their new digs at 500 South Buena Vista Street about a year later.  The Walt Disney Company still calls the site home today.  I was lucky enough to tour it in July 2009.  The photos below are from that visit.

But back to the garage.  In 1981, a foamer named Paul Maher was perusing old photographs of historic sites and came across an image of Uncle Robert’s garage.  A stalker at heart, Maher decided he had to see the place in person and headed over to Kingswell Avenue the next morning.  What he found shocked him.  Not only was the bungalow undergoing a renovation in order to be turned into a rental, but the famous garage was set to be razed.  Thankfully, Paul stepped in.  He quickly tracked down the residence’s owner who offered to sell him the standalone, single-car structure for $6,400 – if he agreed to also become her new tenant.  He moved in shortly thereafter.  Maher soon ran into financial problems, though, and had to vacate the premises.  He subsequently put the garage up for auction for $10,000, but incredibly there were no takers.  As fate would have it, Art Adler, the senior contractor for the purchasing department at Disneyland, happened to be at the auction and couldn’t bear the thought of Walt’s former studio being lost to the ages.  He started chatting up other auction-goers asking them to chip in funds to save the structure and quickly had $8,500 in hand thanks to a band of 8 people who were promptly dubbed “Friends of Walt Disney.”  The group later grew to 18 members, all of whom worked tirelessly to preserve the garage.

All the Friends of Walt Disney needed now was a place to display the structure.  The group contacted several museums, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, but none could guarantee the garage a permanent exhibition space.  Art finally approached the Stanley Ranch Museum, run by the Garden Grove Historical Society, and the organization was thrilled to accept the piece.

The historical society quickly got to work in preparing the 12-by-18-foot structure for its new home.  A concrete slab was poured, broken slats were replaced, protective weather coating was added, and Disney memorabilia was set up inside.  (You can take a peek at the interior here).  The restored garage was dedicated on October 20th, 1984.

Even though Walt technically created the first Alice short in his father’s garage and even though The Walt Disney Company doesn’t officially recognize it, Uncle Robert’s garage is though of by most fans as Walt’s first studio.  Of the structure’s importance, Adler said, “He may not have done a lot of work here, but this is where he started – and that’s what counts.  It is important that this garage be preserved so children can look at the humble beginnings of a man who would later create an empire that brought happiness and joy to children all over the world.  It’s a way to tell kids that you can start from nothing and, in a relatively short time, achieve great things.”

In the interest of being thorough – and to provide some armchair tourism for those who can’t make it out to Stanley Ranch Museum themselves – I snapped photos of each of the garage’s four sides.  That’s its west side below.

There’s the rear.

And the pics below are the best I could get of the east side.

The Disney Garage is hardly the only historical structure located on the grounds of the Stanley Ranch Museum.

The open air site was originally the family home/ranch of horticulturist Edward G. Ware.  In 1970, Ware’s daughter, Lillian Agnes Stanley, donated the two-acre parcel to the Garden Grove Historical Society.  The following year, Stanley’s son gifted the group Ware’s original 1892 residence, a barn, a tank house, and his own Craftsman-style pad.  And thus, a museum was born.

Since that time several of the area’s most historic homes and structures have been donated and moved to the site.  The museum now boasts 17 buildings, including one of the city’s first post offices, originally opened in 1877;

a former Main Street storefront that housed an electric shoe store and a barber shop at various times;

a replica of a firehouse once located on Garden Grove Boulevard;

. . . and many others.

Cloaked in history, Stanley Ranch Museum is a fabulous place for both Disney and non-Disney fans alike to enjoy a sunny Southern California day.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Stanley Ranch Museum, the home of the famous Disney Garage, is located at 12174 Euclid Street in Garden Grove.  Tours are offered the first and third Sunday of every month at 1:30 p.m., so plan accordingly.  Robert Disney’s house, where the garage was originally located, can be found at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in Los Feliz.  Extra Copy, aka Walt Disney’s first official studio, is located just three blocks west at 4647 Kingswell.

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