I’d lay good money that some early migrant from that neck of the New York woods brought the name with him. Its origin is probably the Cayuga people and the onetime Iroquois village of “Ganogeh” near the Finger Lakes of New York. Geological Survey, is very likely a Native American name - but not a California one.
“Canoga,” according to a 1905 place-name explainer from the U.S. Canoga AvenueĪ north-south route far to Burbank’s west is Canoga Avenue, its name just like the Canoga Park neighborhood. He plowed some of that money into his hobby, building the Burbank Theater on Main Street in L.A. His principal Valley pursuit was grazing sheep, not teeth nonetheless, there are, fittingly, dental offices here and there along the length of Burbank Boulevard.ĭoc Burbank came thisaway just after the Civil War, from San Francisco, and bought more than 9,000 acres of land for $9,000, flipping it almost 20 years later for a cool quarter-mil sale to a land development syndicate he owned part of. Burbank and Burbank Boulevard, as we never tire of reminding a world which never tires of ignoring it - I’m talking to you, History Channel - was named for a dentist, David Emory Burbank. Generals and outlaws, heroes and villains: L.A.'s parks are named for a colorful cast of characters. To the south are Beverly Hills and Bel-Air and the Hollywood Hills to the north, Studio City, Sherman Oaks, and the broadening Valley fan out across the Valley floor from Calabasas to Glendale and Burbank.Ĭalifornia Griffith Park is named for a guy who shot his wife - and other true stories of L.A.
On its bend-and-twist miles, principally between the Cahuenga and Sepulveda passes, are a coronet of houses as handsome and costly as jewels, atop slopes and canyons. with the immense water project that stuck an engineered siphon into a lake 233 miles away and brought its water south to the city of thirsting angels. Its name is owed to William Mulholland, who changed the character of the Valley and of L.A. “Long, straight boulevards, most of them too wide for your grandmother to walk across in the span of one green light, are spaced across the plain reliably a half-mile apart,” and “hundreds of feeder streets branch off at right angles from the main arteries to complete the grid.”Īt the summit is the spine, the crest, the southern rim of the Valley, Mulholland Drive. An “obsessively perpendicular grid of streets,” is the way “Valley Guy” Kevin Roderick describes it in his wise book “The San Fernando Valley, America’s Suburb.” Instead, they fan out like airport runways. A great number of its great streets are unlike many roadways elsewhere in L.A., where they are curved or oddly angled to conform to the dip-and-turn contours of hills, or the ghosts of arroyos.