It’s one of L.A.’s few biblical street names – but no one can quite agree on what it means. Zelzah was in fact Northridge’s original moniker, from 1910 to 1929, when the town was mostly a rail depot. (The Zelzah station was named in 1904-1905 on a new Southern Pacific Railroad line.) Its naming is credited to Emily Vose Wright (1855-1917), the pious prohibitionist wife of Francis Marion “Bud” Wright (1841-1937), who would sell the 1,100 acre Hubbard & Wright ranch in 1909 for Zelzah’s development. A March 3rd, 1903 Los Angeles Times article referred to the Wrights’ property – either this ranch or their home in the city of San Fernando – as “Zelzah”, so Emily had coined the name by that point. Yet zelzah appears only once in the Old Testament: a passage in the First Book of Samuel mentions meeting “two men by Rachel’s tomb at zelzah”. It’s been variously interpreted as a suburb of Jerusalem (possibly the town of Beit Jala), as an oasis (“shade from the heat”), and as the hour of high noon. Emily Wright was allegedly working off the “oasis” definition. Zelzah Avenue was named in 1916.