A City’s Life Artery
Leverage Lab calls the 31st and Troost Avenue area of Kansas City, Missouri home. From Osage Indians’ canoe trail to the city’s first “Millionaire’s Row” after the Civil War, this is where the city has gathered and divided itself for generations. It’s also where the most famous cartoon mouse was born. And now it looks like Mickey is returning home and helping transform 31st and Troost into a hotbed of tech, arts, food, and community.
Thank You Walt Disney is an organization that is committed to preserving Walt Disney’s Kansas City history and providing a place for art and animation study, while encouraging confidence and entrepreneurial individualism. A focus is restoring the building that housed Laugh-O-Gram Studios and Disney’s original office. It was in that two-story brick building off Troost that Disney not only developed what would become known as the “Cradle of Hollywood Animation” — the training ground for animators who would later create some of America’s most iconic cartoons — but also where Disney first met and befriended a real-life mouse that would become the inspiration for his most well-known creation: Mickey Mouse.
Read more about Thank You Walt Disney’s Plans for the area.
Meanwhile, just a couple blocks away on 31st Street, Leverage Lab is working hard at restoring a similar building to Laugh-O-Gram. Watch this space for our progress and the date of our office-warming event later this summer.
