Belmont Cragin, Hermosa

Like neighboring Portage Park, the Northwest Side residential community of Belmont Cragin is home to a large number of Polish restaurants, shops and other businesses. Before it was annexed by Chicago in 1889, this town was named after the Cragin Brothers’ metalworking company. The neighborhood’s present-day name comes from that and Belmont Avenue, one of the area’s primary streets. Also predominantly residential, the Hermosa neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of Walt Disney.

Belmont Cragin/Hermosa: Walt Disney’s Birthplace, Coach K. Way, and More

Written by Alan Solomon, with research assistance from the Chicago Neighborhood Tourism Project. 

Belmont Cragin and Hermosa are Chicago neighborhoods, largely residential, with little in common except proximity -- they're side-by-side -- and a manufacturing base lured by the rail lines that help determine their borders.

Belmont Cragin is much larger. But Hermosa has Walt Disney's birthplace

He was born here in 1901, in a second-floor bedroom of a house at the corner of Tripp and Palmer Avenues built eight years earlier by his carpenter father, who had come to Chicago to work at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Jackson Park neighborhood).

It is a simple two-story frame house, split now into upstairs and downstairs rental apartments. There is no marker.

"We do get tourists who come and take pictures, from Denmark, Poland, Japan," says owner Radoje Popovic.

"A crew came with a filmmaker from near Madrid. They claimed Walt Disney was an orphan and that he grew up here but he was Spanish."

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