30 December 2019
Rey Colón, a former alderman for the Hermosa neighbourhood of Chicago, now partners with the Walt Disney Birthplace by performing a number of jobs for the organisation, headquartered in California.
As Rey leads my family and I around the right side of the Disney home, he begins by explaining the rear exterior of the structure.
Rey: Kind of like the yellow tone of the house, that’s the original house. When the house was built, it ended where the light green is. Where that board is. Like I said, the house would not have had the foundation. It would have been at-grade [on the same level]. So, they just would have had a one-step stoop that they could walk out of to come outside of the house. So, the restoration that’s taken place really only reflects the older part of the house. What you’re going to see inside is going to be kind of like the house as it was at that time at that size.
Andrew: Okay.
Rey: The extra space we’re using as a back office, a venue for events and things like that. Also the bays [windows] in the front, that’s been recreated. There are two more houses on the block that Elias Disney built and one of them is not intact but is mostly intact and the other one is totally remodelled, so we took basically the influence of that bay over there on this one here.
Andrew: Do you by any chance know what those addresses are so that we can drive by them later?
Rey: One of them is 2114. I wanna say one of them is 2018 and maybe the other one is 2116 but I’m not 100 per cent sure.
We have now entered the house and are looking at photographs in the parlour.
Rey: This is kind of the way the house looked. We have two pictures of the house. This is more or less how it looked. We have a picture of the house after it was renovated. The other thing is that they made it into two flats so we had to convert it back to a single family home.
Rey: As I mentioned, that’s a colorised picture – the only picture we have of Walt at the house, and Ruth his younger sister. So, after the house was renovated and converted into two flats, this is a photograph of the way it looked like. Which is kind of like the era we would like to replicate. Because we had no plans to go by, we had to do a forensic demolition. This floor was totally replaced, so we couldn’t really use the floor as a guideline. We had to kind of go into the walls. There were a lot more windows here but they were not in the original place so we had to find where the original windows were and put them back. So that’s basically what we did.
Rey: That’s the end of the house right there as it was then. That square there is where there was a window. So, this would have been the living room. In those days they called it the parlour. I guess when people passed away and they had their visitation, they used to do it in the parlour but after they did away with that practice, they changed the name to the living room. Thus, not the dead room. (Laughter) The other thing is that all these mouldings are a recreation of what was there. There was one closet under the stairs that still had the original mouldings, so we replicated those and put them throughout the house.
Rey: This floor is not original to the house but on the second floor, we peeled off a layer of flooring and found the original floor so it was a lot easier to figure out where the bedrooms were. We kind of divided them up accordingly and really reconstructed the second floor based on what was on the floor. Over here, we had to look at what was in the ceiling and what was on the walls in order to find out where everything was.
Rey: This area over here would have been a dining room. This little corner here, that’s a chimney stack. All of the stoves would have been connected to that, both upstairs and downstairs and also in the kitchen. Most likely all the stoves were pretty much connected to that stack. They would have burned coal or wood back in that time. According to the city’s water records, the Disneys were the first on the block to have running water and a sewer, and that’s probably the reason why Elias was building houses on the block because it was a place where he could do that. So, we believe that this was kind of his model home, and in addition to living in it, one that he could show people, ‘You know, this is what you could get.’ And they built this house for $800 at the time.
Andrew: And Flora designed everything.
Rey: Flora designed it. Flora was the architect of the house and Elias built the house.
Rey: Elias was also a deacon at a local church around the corner. And Pastor Walter Barr [sic] and Elias were very good friends. The reverend named one of his children Elias, and Elias named one of his children Walter, which was Walt. It’s interesting because a lot of people in the neighbourhood don’t realise the extensive history that the Disneys have here in the neighbourhood. We even have some old clippings from the Chicago Tribune ground-breaking ceremony for the church. They didn’t use photography, they just did renderings, but there’s a rendering of Elias Disney there.
Rey: We had Mickey Mouse here last year [2018] for Walt’s birthday. On 5 December every year we have some type of a birthday celebration, so that year the Disney Company sent us the real Mickey Mouse from Florida, so it was very nice.
Rey: The house is like 99 per cent complete, but not 100 per cent, so we’re just in the fundraising stage. We’re still trying to get the electronics figured out. You’ll see some of these speakers that are being installed throughout the house for different effects. And this window will be a large LED screen so it will look like a window but when you look outside, you’ll see how things were in 1893 when the house was built. So that’s the plan. Both upstairs and downstairs you’ll see these cut-outs and those are where the original windows were.
Rey: This is the kitchen. Throughout the house you can see we have these little renderings like the one of the living room. They’re concepts of how it might look once we furnish it. We had those renderings done with kind of like period furniture, stoves and appliances and that type of thing. And you’ll see here that we still have this cut-out there. We did find that this was the doorway, but it took us a long time to figure that out because we didn’t want to disrupt any of the original plaster that was in the house. We had to kind of mismatch, where’s their drywall, where’s their plaster and kind of figure out. The owners did take it with them but right over the doorway was a huge horseshoe. And they had it, so we think that was original to the house as well.
Andrew: So, this door would go into the backyard?
Rey: Correct. Back in that time, it would have gone into the yard. We don’t really have any plans of that garage, but most of the neighbours, according to the plans, all had barns at that time.
Andrew: So then in 1905–1906 there was the break-in in the car barn and Elias was upset because the two boys that supposedly killed the police officer were the same age as Ray and Herb. Is that around here? Or was that somewhere else?
Rey: Right. It was around here. It was his kind of like reasoning for wanting to leave Chicago because of the crime in the area. So yeah, that would be been in this area.
Andrew: And that would have been a car barn, kind of like the garage?
Rey: Yes. The other thing I guess that I wanted to point out is it took us a long time to figure out if there was a washroom in the house. But one of the city water inspectors did a tour of the house and pretty much pointed out that the ventilation plumbing which goes up the side of the house, so the washroom would have been under the stairs. They didn’t have a bathtub but they had a toilet and a hand sink. We have a farm sink in the back that has not gotten installed yet, but that’s going to go over on this wall here. And then there will be a stove here which will connect to this chimney stack.
Rey: All the doors were purchased from an old farmhouse in Indiana from that same period. A lot of the oak woodwork and the doors are not original to the house, but we did try to find the wood from that time.
Rey: The railings are not original, but the stairs are. And you’ll see upstairs where the floor looks kind of scratched up, those are original and we didn’t want to alter them. We just scrubbed them down with some Murphy soap and kept things as is.
Rey: Actually in addition to getting the doors donated we also had someone who actually designed that transom from the one at Disneyland and sent it to us. So, we are going to have a light installed in the back of that. But that’s kind of like the Disney crest that you’ll find at Disneyland.
Andrew: That’s cool.
Andrea (Andrew’s wife): That’s really fun.
Rey: It is fun.
Andrea: So, the stairs are original.
Rey: Yeah, the stairs are but the railings are not. (sounds of walking upstairs)
Rey: As you see up here, we had a little more to go by. Some of the floor has been repaired but what you see here is original. So, once we lifted the other floor, we kinda knew where the doorways were and so we just filled it in accordingly. We’ve got three bedrooms up here. One of them would have been the boys’ bedroom and one of them would have been Ruth’s bedroom. And again, that’s the end of the house.
Rey: Our plan here is to keep that doorway but to make it look like a window. So, it will still function as a door so we can still utilise the rest of the house and the emergency exit. They were kind of packed into this house.
Rey: This floor was redone. It’s new. But the reason is because this was a washroom and the original floor was pretty much rotted out. And as I mentioned there was a floor on top of this.
Rey: This would have been another bedroom. Again, the same concept with the magic window.
Andrea: So, these are original floors?
Rey: These are all original except for these boards here. Throughout the house we saw the piping for gas lighting so these boards would have been directly over the light fixture downstairs and this would have been the light fixture that would have been in the dining room.
Andrew: Have you guys been able to identify based on records which room Walt would have been born in?
Rey: Yes. Well, the master bedroom is the most likely room that he was conceived and born in. And it’s the only room that has a closet that’s actually big – a big closet which would lead us to believe that it was most likely kind of a nursery of sorts, ’cuz Ruth was also born here so they had some of the kids here. We’ll go there now.
Rey: And these again are the vents from the little wash closet downstairs. And those vents go up to the ceiling.
Rey: While there was nothing written to confirm it, we believe that this is the room that Walt would have been born in. And again, there is that closet over there that I spoke about. In those days they really didn’t have closets. They would use an armoire. They wouldn’t have that much clothes. So, these windows, again we had to move them to their original location. And you probably see these little name tags around the house – they are part of our fundraising efforts to help get the project done. While Disney has donated to the project this is a non-profit effort and so we are always raising money [in] different ways – finding ways to raise money to keep the project going.
Rey: We also found on our little search there’s this compartment here [points to a square hole in the floor]. When we were sweeping up some linoleum there was this little kind of squared off area here. When I gave the people from Disney Archives a tour, a woman says she has a box that fits this compartment here. [It] would have had all the important papers of the house: birth certificates, marriage certificate, deeds, all that type of stuff. They would have had their bed here and would have had their important stuff hidden under the bed there. It was kind of like their safe.
Andrea: That’s neat.
Rey: Yeah, it is kind of neat. We found a newspaper stuffed in there from 1913, a German newspaper, and the family that bought the house after the Disneys were German, so we think it was something that got left behind when they redid the house and like I said, there was a floor on top of this. They left newspapers throughout the house in the walls. It was kind of like markers of time when they did these different changes. It’s not a very big house, so it’s not a very big tour.
Andrea: The windows were decorated like that? That was the look that they had?
Rey: We put the windows where they originally were. These are Marvin windows so the windows cost more than what they spent to build the house. But we put them in their location and based on the cut-outs that were in the wall, that’s the correct size. The ones downstairs are actually pretty long. They had a lot of sunlight – natural light – in the house.
Andrew: Elias came here in 1893 for the World’s Fair. The World’s Fair was done so he started building houses. What did he do? Was that all he did when he lived here at the house before they moved to Marceline, build houses? Or…
Rey: Well no, he built the houses but I believe he was working on the World’s Fair as well. He was doing both.
Andrew: And that was out at the lakeshore. Did he take a trolley to get out there?
Rey: That’s a good question. I don’t know how he commuted back and forth. You know, when they came back to Chicago they didn’t live in this area. They were closer to the University of Illinois area.
Andrew: And they came back around the First World War, right?
Rey: Yes.
Andrea: So how did you get involved in this?
Rey: I was actually on the Chicago City Council at the time [the house began being restored] and this was my district. They came to see me a few times and after getting off the council, they approached me about becoming part of this project. I’m kind of like the Chicago person on the ground, doing events, getting permits, fundraisers, tours, overseeing the construction and the project management of the restoration of the house. Or to give somebody a tour. I’m the person that’s here. They come a couple of times a year. Eventually we hope to have a full-swing of events and tours happening in the house. There are some events getting planned right now so there will be more fundraising efforts for us to complete the house.
Andrew: So, do you guys have a projected time of when you plan on having it open?
Rey: We do and every time we do, it changes. I’m thinking in another year because everything has taken a year. You know, building the porch… it’s kind of been a pay-as-you-go project so we raise funds, we do another phase. You know we’ve gotten really far on the place. If you would have seen it five years ago it looks nothing like it did back then. I don’t know if you’ve gone on our website, but there are lots of pictures there of what the house used to look like and what it looks like now. Again, we had to de-convert it from a two-flat to a single family home and figure all that out so this was a living room over here, that was a dining room back there, where you saw the bedroom was a washroom, behind the wall was a kitchen in the addition of the house.
Andrew: So, they had a stairway to get up the back or something?
Rey: Yeah, there was a porch – there’s an enclosed porch but it was not part of that period. So that was added on. There was a door downstairs separating that apartment from this apartment. So, when they bought the house there were two families living here.
Maxwell (Andrew’s son): Where’s the beds? Like the beds that used to be here?
Rey: Right now we don’t have any furniture. Part of what we’re doing is we’re raising some money and we’re getting some antique furniture back from that time period. But there’s been a lot of families that have lived here and a lot of different beds that have been here. So, the Disneys took their beds with them when they left.
Andrea: Are you charging a fee to tour it, do you think?
Rey: Yeah, I think the plan is, so as not to disrupt the parking of the neighbours, to have an off-site visitors centre and just kind of be able to tell the story, not just of the house but just the neighbourhood and the church, what the Disneys did and to be able to tell their story. Because the house itself is not a big tour. It’s like really small. But you know, how the house got built, the whole story with the church, Elias being [a] carpenter, and building houses for sale, all of his different business ventures. So, when they came back and Walt was a teenager, he worked at Elias’s – he had some interest in a soda pop company called O-Zell and so the owners of the house bought the rights to O-Zell so they are selling O-Zell soda online. They’re having it made. They have O-Zell coffee. Elias was a religious guy who didn’t like alcohol so the soda business was his thing.
Andrea: We’re glad you could show us.
Rey: We’re glad that the house is here. I live just a couple of doors away from where Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz. And you know, there’s only a marker – there’s a sign on the parkway that says that there was a house here but the house is not there. It’s like public housing there. The one thing that they did that was nice is they replaced the sidewalk with yellow bricks. And they have a big kind of corner marker that says “There’s no place like home”. So that’s something that they just did a few months ago. But you know it makes you grateful [for] an important structure like this, and that we’re able to kind of bring it back to what it would have looked like and pretty much have it intact.
Andrew: Yeah. So, were a lot of the houses that are on this street built the same time as this one?
Rey: Yes, the ones that you see are wood and they would have been the same thing. The houses would have been lifted. There was a lot of flooding that happened in the houses that were at-grade so it just became a thing to start building basements and foundations which is what happened here.
Andrew: Okay. So, they just lifted the entire house then up to a—
Rey: They lifted the entire house. That’s why we lost the floor on the first floor. You probably saw that we have the Honorary Disney Family Avenue street sign. We were able to do that a few years ago. Like I said, because I was on the city council, I was able to write that ordinance and just have the alderman sign off on it. There are street signs between two blocks in both directions.
Andrew: Okay. And then I had talked to the guys that are kind of heading up this project on the phone and they said there’s a school that Roy went to. Is it that big school back there?
Rey: Yes, that school there. That’s Nixon Elementary School, so yeah, Roy would have gone there. Walt was 4 when they moved, so he never got a chance to go there. But that would have been like a state-of-the-art school back in that time period. We have a really good partnership with that school and so whenever we have our events here, their choir, we give them access to the house if they ever want to do storytelling or that stuff. So, we do work with local neighbourhood organisations. That little community library [Rey indicates a small box on a post in the front yard] – this neighbourhood is called Hermosa, so the Hermosa Neighbourhood Association – we worked with them on putting that library together. And we just dedicated that on the fifth of this month.
Andrew: So, then the road – was it a dirt road? Was it blocks like a brick road?
Rey: I’m not sure what they would have used. I know a lot of times they just threw down wood planks and I know a lot of the roads were like that. But when they put in the sewer system, I’m not sure. We’re still replacing a lot of sewers that are 100 years old. Some of them were made out of wood. I’m not sure what they had here. They were replaced—they’ve been replaced since then.
Maxwell: What are those pipes, mommy?
Rey: Those pipes are for air. When you would have flushed the toilet, they needed ventilation and that’s what those pipes are. Having a toilet was a big deal in those days.
Rey: We would love it if you guys signed our guest book.
Andrew: Oh absolutely.
Rey: Whenever I give a tour we like to kind of memorialise who came through.
Andrew: Did this photograph come out of the newspaper? Or was this a photograph that somebody took in the family?
Rey: I’m not sure where they got it. I guess photography was relatively expensive back then so there’s not a lot of it. It looks like they made Walt sit a long time for it. (laughter)
Maxwell: And Ruth.
Rey: And Ruth.
Andrew: So, Flora, she just stayed home with the kids.
Rey: Yes.
Andrew: And Walt and Ruth and the boys just kind of ran around the neighbourhood?
Rey: It looks that way. This part of the city would have been newly incorporated into Chicago. This was a very rural part of the area, so… probably a lot of farmland over here at that time.
Andrew: So, lots of migrants?
Rey: Yes.
Andrew: So, was there a large immigrant population that was moving out to this area? The Europeans?
Rey: Probably German. A lot of German. It was very European back then. I mean, very close to here is Humboldt Park. And like I said, we found the German newspaper, so a German family moved into this. This was primarily German [with] lots of different European ethnicities here.
Andrew: Okay, and how far away were the slaughter yards from here? The stockyards?
Rey: Oh, they were quite a distance from here. They’re very southeast from this location. They would have been nearby – closer to where the Disneys lived when they moved back to Chicago. But even still a little distance from there. It was that far east but further south.
At the end of the tour, we signed the guest book, thanked Rey for his time and parted ways.
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