City Of Metairie Ridge

Metairie Ridge was a road long before it was a city. The Acolapissa used the natural levee, left by an old branch of the Mississippi, as a path, and one history calls it the oldest road in the New Orleans area. French settlers arrived in the 1720s. Metairie is French for a small tenant farm, rented for a share of the crop; many of the first French farmers in the 1760s were tenants, and after the Civil War most residents were sharecroppers until the 1910s. A streetcar line came in the late 1910s and upscale housing in the 1920s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 3.5 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 3.6 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 3.9 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 4.0 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Chartier Concession — steps away
• The New Orleans Katrina Memorial — 0.9 mi
• Charity Hospital Cemetery — 0.9 mi
• Heinemann Park/Pelican Stadium — 1.4 mi