(Above: The former doll museum of Hobby City as it stands today)

Hobby City was a very unique shopping area in Anaheim right next to where Adventure City is. For a while, it co-existed next to Adventure City, and now many of its buildings stand empty. At the time that Hobby City was open, it held a great menagerie of specialty shops, as well as a doll museum built to look like a miniature White House (its exterior, as shown above, still looks the same). In addition to the shops, it also had a petting zoo and a little train that the young ones could ride.

A Doll Museum That Looked Like the White House

The most notable building of Hobby City was, of course, the White-House-looking doll museum. The building still stands (as do most of the other Hobby City buildings), but it is now an event building. When it was a museum,  tons of dolls resided here, from unique Barbies to Shirley Temple dolls to everything in-between. To say there were a ton of dolls is an understatement, as can be seen in this video:

If you liked dolls, you could also take advantage of the doll shop that was at Hobby City, which now appears to be vacant (though it was hard to tell at the time we visited, as everything was closed). This doll shop had collector dolls including collector Barbies and Gene dolls.

This building was formerly the doll shop at Hobby City (not to be confused with the White House-inspired doll museum).

The Hobby City Cabbage Patch Kid Store

A little further toward Beach Blvd. near where there is currently a store carrying a selection of safes, there was a Cabbage Patch Kid store. Yes, you read correctly—this was a store filled with Cabbage Patch Kid items and even included a nursery. It’s tough to describe how elaborate this store was, but if you were a Cabbage Patch fan, this store would have been like a small version of Disneyland for you. Many Cabbage Patch Kid outfits were modeled on dolls lining shelves high up on the walls. Each was numbered, and you could find the corresponding outfit in a bin for purchase.

Hobby City’s Other Stores

Next door to the doll shop was a store that carried Native American items (luckily, there’s a website that still features a page about it). This store is now a baseball-related shop (everything was closed when we went, since it was a holiday, so it wasn’t possible to check out exactly what was inside).

Formerly the pet store at Hobby City, this now-empty building used to house a great variety of fish and other pets.

The baseball-themed shop now at Hobby City used to be a store selling Native American items.

Another noteworthy store was the teddy bear store. The building itself was a cute hut type of structure, and within it were scores of teddy bears. Other stores included a piano store, store for trains and models, and a pet store, among others.

This cute hut was once the site of the teddy bear store at Hobby City.

It’s tough these days to find photos of Hobby City; some images can be found on this Flickr page.