Cudahy Wedding

Cudahy is a city located in southeastern Los Angeles County, California. It is part of the Gateway Cities region. The population was 24,208 at the 2000 census.

Cudahy is named for its founder, meat-packing baron Michael Cudahy (who also lent his name to a suburb of Milwaukee), who purchased the original 2,800 acres (11 km) in 1908 to resell as one acre (4,000 m) lots. These "Cudahy lots" were notable for their dimensions--in most cases, 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 meters) in width and 600 to 800 feet in depth, a length equivalent to a city block or more in most American towns. Such parcels, often referred to as "railroad lots," were intended to allow the new town's residents to keep a large vegetable garden, a grove of fruit trees (usually citrus), and a chicken coop or horse stable. This arrangement, which proved popular in the booming towns along the lower reaches of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, proved particularly attractive to the Southerners and Midwesterners who were leaving their struggling farms in droves in the 1910s and 1920s to start new lives in Southern California. (Well into the 1950s, Cudahy residents were fond of going into the city's tiny downtown on horseback!)