Campo de Cahuenga: Where California became a part of the United States

This is the remains of Campo de Cahuenga, the adobe where the Capitulation of Cahuenga was signed in 1847.  It's on Lankershim Boulevard in Studio City, 100 yards east of the 101 freeway, and right across from the front gates of Universal Studios (the actual studio, not the tourist park entrance). #steveemigphotos

California is famous worldwide, for a lot of reasons.  Hollywood has been the movie and TV capitol of the United States, and most of the world, for about 100 years.  California is also known for the huge high tech center in the San Francisco  Bay Area called Silicon Valley, home to many of the biggest tech companies on Earth, from Apple on down.  California is known for surfing, for music coming out of Hollywood, and for all kinds of creative, weird and unusual people and ideas.  This one state of the 50 in the United States has such influence and reach worldwide, that the Red Hot Chili Peppers wrote the song, "Californication" about that worldwide impact.  

How did this West Coast chunk of the the North American continent become such a powerhouse worldwide on so many levels?  That's a big, long story, and is about not just this huge, diverse piece of land, but the wide array of people who have lived here over the last 174 years.  California was part of Mexico until a war was fought in several regions in the late 1840's.  After small battles in the area around Los Angeles, a local woman helped bring the locals, who called themselves Californios, not Mexicans, around to the idea of peace, providing they be given all the rights of other Americans.  Most people don't realize, but about half of the people who founded Los Angeles were of African descent.  

With her help, the two officials in the area, John C. Fremont representing the U.S., and Andres Pico, representing the Mexican government, sat down in an adobe house and signed the Capitulation of Cahuenga, a treaty ending the Mexican American War in California. This happened on January 13th, 1847.  The adobe was on the backside of the small mountain that the famous Hollywood sign is on.  Universal Studios sits on the hill right above Campo de Cahuenga now. 

The four palm trees (three visible in the photo) are on the property of the Campo de Cahuenga site.  You can faintly see the outline of the building extending across Lankershim Blvd.  This photo was taken from the walk bridge over Lankershim, used daily by people coming out of the Red Line train station, and heading up to the Universal Studios park.  

The Universal City Red Line subway train station, which runs from nearby North Hollywood, through Hollywood, to downtown L.A., is decorated with tiled murals that tell the story of the Mexican American War in this area, and the signing in the treaty, which happened right above the subway station.  Though it's almost completely overlooked by the thousands of tourists and locals who walk and drive by it daily, Campo de Cahuenga is where California as we know it began.  All that's good, bad, influential, and weird with modern California started right here, at Camp de Cahuenga, in 1847.