Metairie And Gentilly Ridges

An abandoned arm of the Mississippi, flowing about thirty miles east from near River Ridge, built the low ground that early inhabitants used as roads. Metairie Road, City Park Avenue, Gentilly Boulevard and U.S. 90 toward Chef Menteur Pass still follow its ridges. Native people called the old channel Bayou Coupicatcha, the French Bayou Métairie. Trapped runoff from Mid-City and Uptown may have broken through the ridge and run north as Bayou St. John. The bayou was filled between the 1920s and 1950s as a nuisance, and the lagoons of lower City Park are its last remnant.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 2.0 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 — 2.0 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 — 2.4 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 — 2.4 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

• Allard Plantation — steps away
• Pitot House — steps away
• Jeanne Jugan — steps away
• Our Lady of the Rosary Rectory — 0.3 mi