Tujunga is a Kizh (a.k.a. Tongva) word which linguists have translated as “place of the old woman”. Who was the old woman in question? Some say Mother Earth, simple as that. Others believe she was a grief-stricken mother of Kizh myth who fled to the hills and turned to stone. (Allegedly, a large rock shaped like an old woman sits in Little Tujunga Canyon and was the origin of the myth, but no one has yet identified it.) Tujunga was also the name of a Kizh settlement in the northeast Valley. It was later the site of Rancho Tujunga, an 1840 land grant given to Pedro and Francisco López; it’s now the Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood. As for the two Tujunga Avenues, NoHo’s was first named in 1887 on a Lankershim Ranch Land and Water Co. map, but most people knew it as Foster Avenue until the 1920s. Burbank’s Tujunga Ave. came around by 1907.
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