Take a drive around the streets bordering Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, and you might notice something unusual. On Riverside Drive, you’ll see the Disney Animation Studios building and the ABC Building, both directly across from the studios. On Buena Vista Street, you’ll see the Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center, where Walt Disney spent his last days — and where today a cancer center now bears his name. On Alameda Avenue, there’s a church and a Disney-owned daycare.
But on Keystone Street, it’s eerily quiet, and eerily perfect. The two small suburban blocks are manicured to pinpoint accuracy, a living picture of single-family paradise in sunny Los Angeles. The long run of houses, driveways and front lawns looks that way because the Walt Disney Company demands it.
Disney secretly owns nearly all the homes on the east side of the street, directly adjacent to the studio lot. The shady, idyllic street looks like it could be straight out of a movie — and depending on which film you’re watching, you might have seen the street on your screen. The homes are Disney’s version of an average neighborhood back lot and have been used in many productions. Sometimes, the homes are used as corporate housing as well.
Disney keeps very quiet about owning the properties, preferring not to draw attention to them. On Google Maps, many of the homes are blurred out. But unlike Disney’s Golden Oak Ranch in Santa Clarita, another secretive location the company prefers to keep out of the public conversation, Keystone Street — a regular Burbank road that’s open to public traffic — is impossible to conceal.
That’s not to say it’s always easy to walk the block. When I attempted to visit for this story in early April, the street was shut down for a production. Dozens of employees filled the street, and some production vehicles with lights were in plain view, as well as some pop-up tents covering a video village or base camp.
On any given day, something very exciting could be happening on the street, or nothing at all. I’ve driven down it many times, where there’s not a soul to be seen, and other times where there are official-looking production vehicles casually parked down the block. According to the Randy West Appreciation Group on Facebook, Disney security regularly patrols the homes.
“I drive by here every single day,” @ibet3girls wrote on an Instagram post about the houses. “Every single time I think of the Stepford wives. In fact, we call them the Stepford homes.”
The Walt Disney Company started buying the houses in 1991 ahead of a massive planned expansion of the studio campus. At the time, a concerned neighbor on Keystone Street questioned the company’s motives for the purchases. “We didn’t know if they might rezone and squeeze people out,” Lois Thomson told the Los Angeles Times at the time. “I still feel uneasy about it.”
“Disney executives said the company bought seven houses on Keystone Street in the past year to provide temporary housing for relocated managers, and has no plans to rezone the area or to remove the houses,” writer Carol Watson said in the 1991 article. According to Redfin, the homes on the block are currently zoned as “Single Family Residential Horsekeeping Zone,” befitting the heavily equestrian area.
It wasn’t the first time Burbank had hesitated on Disney’s expansion plans. Walt Disney’s original vision for Disneyland was to build a theme park called Mickey Mouse Park adjacent to Walt Disney Studios on land between Riverside Drive and the LA River. The city rejected the proposal, citing concerns about cleanliness, public nuisance and guests of low moral character. “We don’t want the carny atmosphere in Burbank!” a city council member said after the 1952 vote, according to Walt’s Folly. “We don’t want people falling in the river, or merry-go-rounds squawking all day long.” In response, Disney relocated the park to Anaheim, and the rest is history.
Disney productions like “The Million Dollar Duck” and “Wicked City” have shot there. Keystone Street hasn’t just been the filming location for Disney projects, either. Scenes from the original “Halloween,” released in 1978, were also filmed on Keystone and the attached Parkside Avenue.
The name Keystone appears elsewhere in Disney lore. Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park at Walt Disney World features a shop called Keystone Clothiers, though given the park’s golden age of Hollywood theme and Echo Park setting, it’s likely that the store is named after Keystone Studios, once located in the real Echo Park, where silent film-era stars like Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson made movies.
