Metairie, Louisiana
unincorporated suburban community and census-designated places in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, United States
Metairie ( MET-ər-ee) is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, United States, and is part of the New Orleans metropolitan area. With a population of 143,507 in 2020, Metairie is the largest community in Jefferson Parish, the fifth-largest CDP in the United States, and the largest outside Clark County, Nevada. It is an unincorporated area that (as of 2020) would have been Louisiana's fourth-largest city behind Shreveport if incorporated.
History
Métairie (French: [metɛʁi]) is the French term for a small tenant farm which paid the landlord with a share of the produce, a practice also known as sharecropping (in French, métayage). In the 1760s, many of the original French farmers were tenants; after the Civil War, the majority of the community's inhabitants were sharecroppers until urbanization started in the 1910s.
In the 1720s, French settlers became the first Europeans to settle Metairie in the area known then as Tchoupitoulas and now as Metairie Ridge, a natural levee formed by an ancient branch of the Mississippi River, Bayou Metairie, which flowed through modern-day River Ridge, Metairie, Gentilly, and New Orleans East. It emptied into Mississippi Sound. The Acolapissa Native Americans used this ridge as a road; it is the oldest road in the New Orleans area. An electric streetcar was installed running along the road in the late 1910s, opening the area to greater development. Upscale housing tracts were constructed off the road in the 1920s; this area is now known as "Old Metairie".
The public source identifies “Metairie, Louisiana” as unincorporated suburban community and census-designated places in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Metairie, Louisiana and unincorporated.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q126661. VIAF identifies the subject as 130076800. The Library of Congress control number is n85092156. Authority coordinates are 29.998, -90.177. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Metairie, Louisiana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.