Where to Stay in Metairie, Louisiana

What is Metairie known for?

Metairie holds more people than any other community in Jefferson Parish, yet it has never incorporated, which leaves it a census-designated place rather than a city with its own hall. Sport fills the local register. The Shrine on Airline gives Metairie a stadium of its own, while the museums and quarters that visitors actually come for sit over the line in New Orleans, minutes away by road.

What are the main landmarks in Metairie?

The landmark register here belongs to the wider metropolitan area. Shrine on Airline stands as the suburb's own, while the roll of famous buildings sits over the line, from The Cabildo and Madame John's Legacy in the old quarter to the Old Ursuline Convent, the Hermann-Grima House and the Beauregard-Keyes House. Museums cluster there too.

The National World War II Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Louisiana State Museum carry the biggest names.

What is the history of Metairie?

Metairie skipped incorporation entirely. It grew as a settled area of Jefferson Parish beside New Orleans and stayed unincorporated as it filled out, so it carries the census-designated place label instead of a charter, a mayor or a founding date. No document marks a beginning.

Growth was continuous rather than declared, and the suburb passed the size of every other community in Jefferson Parish without ever acquiring the municipal machinery that a comparable Louisiana city would hold. The deeper past sits over the parish line. New Orleans accumulated the buildings that define the area's record, among them The Cabildo, the Old Ursuline Convent and Madame John's Legacy, all of them older than the suburban tract development that produced Metairie.

Napoleon House and the Hermann-Grima House belong to the same layer. White City and the George Washington Cable House sit in the same older register. Later generations added the institutions that read the past back to visitors, from the Louisiana State Museum and the 1850 House to the National World War II Museum, and Metairie's own contribution to that inventory is the Shrine on Airline rather than anything from the older centuries.

Where is Metairie?

Flat ground runs to every edge. Metairie occupies a stretch of Jefferson Parish that meets New Orleans without a visible boundary, low and level enough that the built-up area reads as one continuous surface broken only by its roads. No hill interrupts it.

The subtropical lowlands of Louisiana leave the suburb without relief of any kind, so its shape follows the road grid and the parish line rather than any ridge or valley.

What is the climate of Metairie?

Damp air is the baseline. The subtropical band that Louisiana sits in gives Metairie long hot months in which the air over the flat lowland holds its moisture from morning through to the middle of the night. Winter is a brief interruption.

Cold snaps pass through New Orleans and its suburbs quickly, and rain arrives in heavy bursts that the level ground of Jefferson Parish sheds slowly.

How do you get to Metairie?

Cars carry in nearly all of Metairie's visitors. Metairie sits inside the New Orleans metropolitan area with no gap between it and the city, so the approach is a matter of leaving one set of parish roads and joining another, usually without noticing the line. Jefferson Parish handles the traffic.

Visitors coming for the Shrine on Airline or the suburban hotel stock drive straight in, while those heading for the older quarters keep going and cross into New Orleans, a run that rarely takes long outside the worst of the commute.