Centuries ago, the Kizh (a.k.a. Tongva) people established a village in the southeastern San Fernando Valley. Modern historians spell this village “Kawee’nga”. The old Spanish settlers went with “Cahuenga”. In a sense it’s all the same, since Kizh wasn’t a written language. (Early settler Hugo Reid, who actually knew these people, wrote it as “Cahueg-na” in 1852.) At any rate, today’s Cahuenga Boulevard follows the ancient footpath – the Cahuenga Pass – between the Los Angeles basin and the village, allegedly located near present-day Universal City. (The Treaty of Cahuenga, which ended California’s involvement in the Mexican–American War, was signed here by Andrés Pico and John C. Frémont on January 13th, 1847.) For years it was known as the Cahuenga Road and the Cahuenga Valley was the pre-Hollywood name for Hollywood, which is why this “Valley street” goes all the way down to Hancock Park. So what does cahuenga actually mean? Some old-timers thought it the name of a particular tribal chief; Hugo Reid wrote that chiefs adopted the names of their villages. And one dubious old theory claimed that “Cahuenga!” meant, for the native archers who once guarded the pass, “Hold your fire!” More modern translations suggest “place of the hill”; UCLA linguistics professor Pamela Munro has it as “place of the fox”. I’d think the latter would refer to Century City, not Universal City, but never mind.
Find it on the map:
