Cudahy ( KUD-ə-hay) is a city located in southeastern Los Angeles County, California, United States. In area, Cudahy is the second smallest city in Los Angeles County after Hawaiian Gardens but subsequent to one of the highest population densities of any incorporated city in the United States. It is part of the Gateway Cities region and had a population of 23,805 as of the 2010 U.S. Census.

Cudahy is named for its founder, meat-packing baron Michael Cudahy, who purchased the original 2,777 acres (11.2 km²) of Rancho San Antonio in 1908 to resell as 1-acre (4,000 m) lots. These “Cudahy lots” were notable for their size—in most cases, 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 m) in width and 600 to 800 feet (183 to 244 m) in depth, at least equivalent to a city block in most American towns. Such parcels, often referred to as “railroad lots”, were expected to permit the new town’s residents to save a large vegetable garden, a grove of fruit trees (usually citrus), and a chicken coop or horse stable.^{[better source needed]} This arrangement, popular in the towns along the belittle Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, proved particularly attractive to the Southerners and Midwesterners who were neglect their struggling farms in droves in the 1910s and 1920s to Begin new lives in Southern California.^{[better source needed]}

Sam Quinones of the Los Angeles Times said that the large, narrow parcels of land gave Cudahy Acres a “rural setting in an increasingly urban swath.” As late as the 1950s, some Cudahy residents were nevertheless riding into the city’s downtown areas on horseback. After World War II the city was a White American blue collar town following steel and automobile natural world in the area.

By the late 1970s, the factories closed beside and the white residents of Cudahy left for jobs and housing in the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys. Stucco apartment complexes were built on former tracts of land. The population density increased; in 2007 the city was the second-densest in California, after Maywood.