CHICAGO -- When Dina Benadon and her husband, Brent Young, first heard that Walt Disney was born in Chicago and that his birthplace was still standing, she was shocked.
"I had always thought Walt Disney was born in Missouri," said Benadon, who works with her husband as a producer and designer of theme park rides and interactive media theme park attractions in Southern California. "We had no idea he was born in Chicago. So when we found the home, we said if we don't know that, there must be a lot of other people who don't know that."
In fact, Disney's family lived for almost 15 years in the two-story frame home, located at 2156 N. Tripp. Ave. in Chicago's working class Hermosa neighborhood on the city's Northwest Side. "The Disneys spent more time here as a family than anywhere else," Benadon said. "They were a family of seven living in a 1,200 square foot home."
Benadon and Young ended up buying the Walt Disney Birthplace in 2013 for a reported $169,000. And since then, they've been active in restoring the home to its state in 1901, when Walt Disney was born.
What makes the house even more special is that it was designed by Walt Disney's mother, Flora. And it was built by Disney's father, Elias.
"When people talk about Chicago, they talk about Al Capone, they talk about Michael Jordan," said Rey Colon, the former Chicago alderman who is now director of the Walt Disney Birthplace. "But they never think about how Walt Disney was born here. I want that to be a known fact."
It's now been ten years since the Disney ancestral home was bought by Young and Benadon. And since that time, they've worked with dozens of volunteers, along with Colon, to restore the home to the way it looked when Elias and Flora Disney lived there with their five children.
"We've been able to kind of do a forensic demolition of the house and take it apart very carefully to not disrupt anything'" Colon said. "We've been able to find out where the original windows were, strip things down to the original flooring, find places where we could find the original moldings and recreate the house to bring it back to its historic state."
'When we got the house, there was aluminum siding all around the home, so we had to peel that off," Benadon recalled. "And what was amazing, as unattractive as the aluminum siding was, it protected the original wood that Elias himself hung on the house."
The first stage of the restoration project is nearly completed. That's thanks to those volunteers, and some generous donors, including the Walt Disney Company (the parent company of ABC and ABC7 Chicago), which donated $250,000 to the restoration of the home back in 2016.
So now we can see the second floor bedroom which Walt shared with his older brother, Roy, with its walls now painted with cool pastels and furnished with a vintage desk and a Schwinn tricycle - a fitting touch since the famous Chicago-based bicycle factory was also located in the Hermosa neighborhood.
Benadon says the room is where Walt and Roy bonded - a union that eventually led to the two brothers co-founding the Disney Studios 100 years ago in Los Angeles. "Roy Disney was eight years old when Walt was born, and there are so many books talking about how Roy really took care of Walt and they were a team," Benadon said. "And really this is where their partnership started."
The Disney family parlor is also now restored to its early 20th century appearance, along with the first floor kitchen and dining room.
And the hallowed second floor room at the front of the house where Walt and his siblings were born has also been restored to its 1901 state.
"It's really amazing to look at it now," Benadon said during a recent June event in front of the Disney home called "Creativity Days", where the Birthplace owners held a block party and arts festival.
The event was held on June 24th, which was also the 130th birthday of Disney Studios co-founder, Roy O. Disney. During that event, Chicago alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, whose 35th Ward includes the Birthplace, read a proclamation from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, declaring it "Roy O. Disney Day."
"I'm just so happy of all of the efforts that have gone on here to rehabilitate this home and make it an attraction for families, for Walt Disney fans, and for people all across the globe to come here and learn," Ramirez-Rosa said.
Plans to open the house up to the community and visitors are part of the next stage of the project, according to Benadon.
The Birthplace owners have already established a center for Early Childhood Creativity and Innovation at the site. This not-for-profit group will create arts education programming at the site. And the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago is partnering with this group to offer arts classes and activities for children in the neighborhood.
As part of its mission to connect with the community, the Birthplace owners also created an "Ambassador" position as a liasion between the community and the home. That ambassador, Angel Reyes, grew up in the Hermosa neighborhood and is now Miss Illinois 2022.
"I always knew that Walt Disney was born in the neighborhood and that's inspired me my whole life," Reyes said.
But Benadon, Young and Colon have larger plans for the home. At the "Creativity Days" event, Benadon announced that the Birthplace will soon establish online virtual tours of the home. "We want visitors from Illinois to India to be able to see where Walt was born," she said.
But ultimately, the Birthplace owners want to open up the home to visitors, and have them experience a multimedia-rich experience inside the two-story structure, complete with animatronics and video and audio which will recreate what it was like to be in the Disney home at the turn of the 20th century.
"What we're trying to do on the inside is transport guests from 2023 to 1903 and really have them walk through these doors and experience what it would've been like to be Walt Disney as a child," Benadon said.
Benadon and Young are used to creating these kinds of multimedia-rich experiences for their Silver Lake, Calif.-based company, Super 78 Studios, which specializes interactive media attractions for theme parks.
But creating a multimedia-rich experience inside the Disney Birthplace will require additional funding, which Benadon estimates to be $1 million. "We were able to finish the restoration of the home, and now we have a blank slate to work with," she said.
That "blank slate" is chock full of Disney history.
Elias Disney, an itinerant contractor whose family was based in Florida, originally bought the Tripp property in 1891, after he was hired to work at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. After Flora designed the home, Elias built it with his own hands, finishing it and moving his family of two children in the structure in 1893. Roy was born in the home that same year, while Walt was born in the home on Dec. 5, 1901
"My dad worked as a carpenter on the World's Fair buildings," Walt Disney told Saturday Evening Post journalist Pete Martin in a 1956 interview. "He worked as a carpenter for $1 a day. And out of that, he and my mother saved enough money to go in business. I don't know how he did it. He eventually ended up as a contractor. He'd buy land and mother drew the plans. My dad would build the houses and then sell them."
Two of the homes that Elias built on the 2100 block of North Tripp Avenue are still standing and are inhabited by families. And in 1900, Elias also built a church a block away from the Disney home at 2255 N. Keeler Ave. - the St. Paul Congregational Church. That church, now known as the Iglesia Evangelica Bautista Betania (translated as the Bethany Evangelical Baptist Church), is still in use.
Legend has it that Walt Disney was named after the pastor of the church.
"This is the church that Elias, Flora and the Disney family would attend," Colon said. "Elias Disney was a deacon and the pastor of this church, Rev. Walter Barr was his dear friend. They formed a pact where they would name their children after each other. And therefore the reverend of the church, Walter Barr named his child Elias and Elias in turn named his son Walter."
The Disney family would move from Chicago to Marceline, Missouri in late 1906, concerned about increasing crime in the neighborhood.
"A neighboring family just like ours was very close to us," Roy O. Disney told journalist Richard Hubler in a 1967 interview. "We woke up one morning and two of their boys were involved in a car barn robbery. Shot it out with the cops, killed a cop. One of them went to Joliet (Correctional Center) for life.
"We had a nice neighborhood, a lot of good Irish and Poles and Swedes around there, but it was a rough neighborhood, too, in a way," Roy Disney said.
Nowadays, the Hermosa neighborhood is 82 percent Latinx, according to data from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. And many in that still working class neighborhood see Disney's story as an inspiration for their own lives.
"Walt, you know, through many failures in his life, he followed his dreams and he changed the world," Colon said. "And we believe that his birthplace home, the place where in the first four years of his life, pretty much determined his personality and his character."
"This house proves that even from humble beginning and under modest means, if you follow your dreams, you too can change the world," Colon said.
Disney is the parent company of this station.
