Campo de Cahuenga

The building here is a replica, dedicated in 1950 and now understood to be a loose approximation of what actually stood on this ground. The real Campo de Cahuenga is underneath the street. The original adobe was gone by 1900 — Frémont came looking in the 1880s and found nothing left of it — and it stayed lost until 1995, when crews trenching for the Metro subway station struck cobblestone and floor tile a few inches down. Excavations through the early 2000s traced a stone foundation ninety-nine feet by thirty, lying crosswise to the replica and running out beneath Lankershim Boulevard. Tongva pottery came up with it, along with mission-era tile and animal bone. The foundations were reburied to protect them.

What you can see is the outline. The footprint is set into the sidewalk in decorative paving and carried on into the roadway, and it stops partway across Lankershim at the limit of what the subway dig was permitted to reach. The rest is under the traffic. Andrés Pico and John C. Frémont signed terms here on January 13, 1847 that ended the fighting in California; the war itself had thirteen months left to run and finished with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848. A fountain on the grounds honors Bernarda Ruiz. The park sits across from Universal City, wedged between the Metro station and its parking, and the interpretive building keeps short and irregular hours — the paving is there whenever you are, the inside is not.