In Defense of Metairie: New Orleans' Favorite Punchline

Metairie is the big unincorporated community just west of New Orleans in Jefferson Parish, and if you live in the city, you've probably made fun of it at least once this week. We have. It's tradition. But Metairie has more history and more character than the jokes give it credit for, so consider this our apology, delivered with love and a slight smirk.

First, the basics. Metairie isn't a city. It has no mayor. It's a census-designated place, and with 143,507 people at the 2020 census, per Wikipedia, it's the largest community in Jefferson Parish. That's more people than a lot of actual cities in Louisiana. They just never bothered to incorporate.

Metairie and New Orleans: The Joke, Explained

Every New Orleanian has a version of it. Metairie is where you go when you want to be safe and parked in a big lot. It's chain restaurants and people who drive into the city once a year for a parade and complain about the parking the whole way home.

You can't escape it, either. Our Metairie shirt, designed by Snowball Stand, plays it like a horror movie poster: "A fate worse than death! You can't escape!"

The thing is, the joke only works because everybody knows somebody from Metairie. Half of us went to high school with them. Half of us have a mama who lives there now because she wanted a driveway. The jokes are what you say about family.

Older Than You Think

Here's where the defense starts. The name is old French. A métairie was a small tenant farm that paid the landlord with a share of the crop. And Metairie Ridge, the high ground the community grew up on, is a natural levee left behind by an ancient branch of the Mississippi. Long before it was a suburb, Native Americans used that ridge as a road, one of the oldest routes in the whole area.

A streetcar ran along it starting in the late 1910s, and the grand houses built in the 1920s along that corridor are what people still call Old Metairie. Drive down it sometime and try to keep calling the place soulless. It's hard.

One fun piece of trivia. Metairie Cemetery, one of the prettiest cemeteries around, isn't in Metairie at all. It's inside New Orleans city limits. The city borrowed the name and never gave it back.

Bucktown, the Wild Part

If you want to understand Metairie's rowdy side, go to Bucktown, the old fishing village in its northeast corner where the 17th Street Canal meets the lake. According to Visit Jefferson Parish, its early history ran on fishing, gambling, boatbuilding, fighting and liquor, and nobody's quite sure where the name came from. Jelly Roll Morton wrote "Bucktown Blues" about it. That should tell you something.

Hurricanes knocked it down more than once. A storm flattened it in 1915. Another in 1947 led to a higher lakefront levee that wiped out most of the camps along the shore. The last camps on the canal came out in 1988. During Katrina, Bucktown flooded a foot or more and drained fast, while across the canal the floodwall failed and Lakeview sat underwater for weeks. We wrote about what Lakeview has been through.

Bucktown is still about seafood. New Orleans Magazine reported a few years back that a small shrimp fleet still ties up at a marina past the levee, and the restaurants still pull people in on summer evenings. If you're going to a backyard boil in Metairie this spring, brush up on the etiquette first. Suburb or not, they take it seriously.

The Lakefront

Metairie sits right on Lake Pontchartrain, and the southern end of the Causeway lands here. That means some of the best lake views in the area belong to Metairie, and on a breezy evening on the lakefront levee, you will forget about the strip malls entirely.

Pontcha Surf Club, a local outfit that's been chasing waves at Grand Isle since 2017, named itself after the lake. Their mosquito pin honors the lakefront's most loyal resident.

Lakeside and the Shopping Mall Era

Lakeside Shopping Center opened in 1960 as the first regional mall in the New Orleans area, according to Biz New Orleans. For a lot of us, Lakeside was where you went for school clothes and ran into somebody from your church in the food court.

You can make fun of the mall all you want. You've been there in December. We all have.

Fat City: The French Quarter That Wasn't

And then there's Fat City, the roughly 100 acres just west of Lakeside between Veterans and West Esplanade. In the early 1970s, the plan was to turn it into the "French Quarter of Jefferson Parish," with bars and music clubs, as Biz New Orleans recounted in 2024.

For a while, it worked. Fat City was where a lot of people did their nightlife through the 1970s and early '80s. By the late 1980s it had real crime and drug problems, and the parish spent years trying to clean it up with rezoning and earlier bar closing times, and later with new investment. The latest push includes green space and sidewalk and drainage work. Ask anyone over fifty about Fat City and watch their face. That's a whole story right there.

We Love You, Metairie

So no, Metairie isn't the city. It's not trying to be. It's the place where your cousin has a pool, and where you can find parking at the hardware store on a Saturday.

And it's had its own rowdy, lake-soaked history all along. We'd just never admit that out loud at a crawfish boil.

If you want to keep the bit going, our Metairie Is In Retrograde shirt is for those weeks when nothing goes right and you're pretty sure it's Metairie's fault.

Metairie New Orleans: FAQ

Is Metairie part of New Orleans?

No. Metairie is an unincorporated community in Jefferson Parish, next door to New Orleans. It's part of the metro area, but it has no city government of its own.

What does Metairie mean?

It comes from the French métairie, a small tenant farm whose tenant paid rent with a share of the harvest.

What is Bucktown in Metairie?

Bucktown is a historic fishing village in Metairie's northeast corner, at the 17th Street Canal and Lake Pontchartrain. It's known for seafood restaurants and a rowdy early history.