How is Jefferson Parish different from New Orleans? Take a look back over 200 years

 Jefferson Parish’s origin story begins, unsurprisingly, in a dispute with its neighbor. In 1825, Louisiana had just 29 parishes, and the story goes that one of them, Orleans, wanted to levy a property tax to raise money for a new courthouse.

Legend has it that a howl came from the big plantation owners on both sides of the Mississippi River. Though fewer in number than the landowners in the urban core, they stood to pay the most in taxes. 

They persuaded the Legislature to let them secede, thus carving out the new parish of Jefferson, named for the former U.S. president. The parish extended from Felicity Street in today’s Lower Garden District to what is now the St. Charles Parish line, and included West Jefferson as well.

“My joke is that nothing has changed in 200 years,” said Frank Borne Jr., former president of the Jefferson Historical Society. “Jefferson is still anti-tax for the most part, and still tries to be the antithesis of New Orleans.”

As Jefferson Parish marks its bicentennial this year, officials are taking time to reflect with a series of special events and dedications, like a new pelican sculpture that was installed last month outside the parish building in Gretna. While much has changed in the last two centuries, including the demographic makeup of the parish, history shows that conflict has long defined attitudes on both sides of the Orleans-Jefferson line.

Jeffersonians sometimes look down their collective nose at New Orleans’ failing infrastructure, political dysfunction and higher crime rate. In 1987, for example, the Parish Council ordered the erection of wood-and-steel barricades on two inter-parish streets, ostensibly to block access by New Orleans criminals. Mayor Sidney Barthelemy promptly sent a bulldozer to raze the ramparts.

From the other side, New Orleanians tend to stereotype Jefferson as a soulless, treeless expanse of concrete and cookie-cutter brick ranch houses, the residents of which benefit from New Orleans’ charms without paying its taxes. In 1978 and again in 1983, Mayor Dutch Morial tried to impose an earnings tax on commuters who worked in the city but lived elsewhere. Jefferson’s hackles were raised, and both attempts failed.

Yet each side has been known to aid the other, too. In 1907, when a fire raged down Sala Avenue, threatening to destroy every structure in Westwego, New Orleans ferried horse-drawn fire engines across the river to help suppress the flames, limiting the losses to 42 buildings, according to a 2000 Preservation in Print article by Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella.

In the 1990s, during an especially alarming outburst of violent crime in New Orleans, Jefferson Sheriff Harry Lee assigned deputies to help the city’s police force keep the peace. And the day after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, when New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass called for help in his flooded city, Lee sent over 200 semiautomatic pistols.

Indeed, Jefferson Parish political and business leaders have often sounded a note of mutualism, saying that as New Orleans goes, so goes Jefferson. That might be more important than ever now, with both challenged by climate change and rising property insurance premiums as they seek to thrive again long after their populations peaked.

Early days

There is evidence of human civilization within what is now Jefferson Parish perhaps as far back as 500 B.C. in the form of Native American settlements. After Europeans arrived in the early 18th century, settlers began raising cattle, growing produce on truck farms, working at riverfront industries, fishing and hunting in the territory. The pirate Jean Lafitte made his headquarters at the southern tip of the territory on Grand Terre, just northeast of Grand Isle.

Closer to the Mississippi River, some of the east bank plantations occupied what is now the Garden District, Uptown and Carrollton sections of New Orleans.

In the first U.S. census after Jefferson Parish was created, in 1830, Jefferson’s population was 6,846, making it the 10th largest of the state's 31 parishes. Orleans Parish was No. 1, with 49,826 residents.

But as New Orleans’ population spread from the French Quarter across Canal Street into the American sector and beyond, and after today’s St. Charles Avenue streetcar line opened in 1833, the plantations were gradually subdivided and the land was sold for residential development.

Between 1852 and 1874, New Orleans clawed back some of its old territory, annexing three cities above Felicity Street: Lafayette, Jefferson and Carrollton, depriving Jefferson Parish of what today is considered some of the city’s most charming and valuable real estate.

The Jefferson City annexation, in 1870, provides another example of the clash between New Orleans and its suburb. Jefferson had strongly favored the Confederacy during the Civil War, and its White residents chafed afterward at federal occupation and the Reconstruction state government in Baton Rouge, Campanella says. Irked, Republican Gov. Henry Warmoth sought to replace the Jefferson City Council with his own appointees and dispatched the integrated Metropolitan Police. Over two days in 1869, the Metropolitan Police, backed by federal troops, fought with Jefferson City’s police and residents. Two people were killed and almost two dozen wounded.

“When the smoke cleared, Jefferson was an occupied city, and Warmoth’s appointees took power,” Campanella wrote in a 2017 article.

By this time, canal digging had spurred more commerce on the West Bank, as did the arrival of railroads on both sides of the Mississippi.

Land development also increased as automobiles grew popular early in the 20th century and cow paths became thoroughfares. Fourth Street carried traffic across six miles of the West Bank, and Jefferson Highway and Airline Highway stretched across the east bank. The draining of swampland triggered more development in East Jefferson.

Two of the big landowners who saw potential in Jefferson Parish were Henri Bonnabel and Louis H. Marrero Sr.

Bonnabel was a chemist from Paris who moved to New Orleans the year that Jefferson Parish came into being and, in 1836, bought a large tract of vacant land in Metairie. He and his descendants developed the Bonnabel Place and Old Homestead subdivisions.

Marrero was a Mississippi native and Confederate Army veteran who moved to Jefferson Parish in 1881 and soon entered politics. Marrero was sheriff from 1896 to 1920, during which time he also was president of Jefferson Commercial & Savings Bank. He began buying land and in 1904 formed Marrero Land & Improvement Association, which amassed hundreds if not thousands of acres. Marrero’s descendants still control the privately held family company, a major player in West Bank real estate circles.

The big boom

It was after World War II that Jefferson’s population exploded, much as suburbs burgeoned across the United States when soldiers returned home and with new wives started the Baby Boom generation. Special loans for military veterans, rising living standards and a desire for more space combined with cheaper land and new, single-family detached houses to make it happen. Notably, housing discrimination was still legal at this time, one reason that Jefferson grew to be a White middle class suburb.

In 1946 alone, two big employment bases opened in East Jefferson. One was New Orleans’ new airport, Moisant Field, on the cane fields once owned by Minor Kenner. The other was Ochsner Clinic, which opened its first hospital at Camp Plauche, a former military base in what is now Elmwood.

Jefferson’s population doubled in the 1940s, and doubled again in the 1950s. East Jefferson’s third major east-west thoroughfare, after Jefferson and Airline highways, opened in 1956, when Veterans Memorial Boulevard was completed.

West Jefferson’s population growth was largely driven by the 1958 opening of the Greater New Orleans Bridge, now the Crescent City Connection, which kicked off large-scale housing construction.

By 1960, Jefferson had ballooned to 208,769 people, No. 4 among 64 parishes. And it was the last year that Jefferson would give a majority of its votes to a Democrat running for president, John F. Kennedy.

That was also the year that New Orleans’ population peaked, at 627,525, and, fatefully, the year that the city began desegregating its public schools, prompting even more White families to move to the suburbs. That demographic wave, along with its internal population growth, came so fast that Jefferson could not build schools fast enough to accommodate everyone; some schools ran platoon schedules into the 1970s, with one set of students in the morning and another in the afternoon.

Because it played out in the political arena and in the courts, New Orleans’ school desegregation has often been seen as the major driver of Jefferson’s population growth. It was important, to be sure, but hardly the only stimulus.

“They absolutely were taking their kids out of integrated schools,” said Justin Nystrom, chair of the history department at Loyola University. “But they also wanted two bathrooms and three bedrooms and a yard and a driveway. They wanted the suburban lifestyle.”

The completion of Interstate 10 through East Jefferson in the 1960s made it even easier to live in Jefferson and work in New Orleans or elsewhere in the region.

But by the 1970s, Jefferson had shed some of its image as bedroom community. It had its own private employment clusters in the airport (now named New Orleans International), Elmwood Business Park, Ochsner, Lakeside Shopping Center and major industry lining the Mississippi River and the Harvey Canal on the West Bank.

When the oil bust hit in the mid-1980s, however, Jefferson’s population actually decreased for the first time in a century. It fell to 448,306 by 1990, still No. 2 in Louisiana, and has not changed appreciably since then. Jefferson closed six of its public schools in 2012 and another six in 2023, largely due to declining enrollment, and some of its public playgrounds see hardly any youths anymore.

Thirty years after peaking, New Orleans’ population in 1990 was 496,938. Since Hurricane Katrina depopulated the city in 2005, it has never eclipsed 400,000. It’s now the third most populous parish, after East Baton Rouge and Jefferson.

The big gainer since 1960: St. Tammany Parish, which has climbed from No. 21 to No. 5 — in part as second- and third-generation Jeffersonians moved from the inner ring suburb where they grew up to the exurb across the Lake Pontchartrain.

Older, more diverse

It’s not just the population numbers that have changed, however. Jefferson is racially more diverse and relatively poorer, too. And the suburb is aging faster than the rest of the country.

Its median age, 39.9 years, is higher than and rising faster than that of the state and the U.S. 

Jefferson’s poverty rate, 9.5% in 1980, has since risen to 15.2%. And in 1980, about 1 in 5 of Jefferson’s census tracts had a poverty rate higher than 20%; now it’s almost 1 in 2.

At the same time, Jefferson’s racial makeup has diversified. As late as 2000, two thirds of its residents identified as non-Hispanic White. In 2020, less than half did.

The major reason: An influx of Hispanic/Latino residents. They made up 7% of Jefferson’s population in 2000, and 18% in 2020.

These shifts are reflected in inner ring suburbs across the nation.

“While many of these communities are doing well or even thriving, others have encountered serious challenges with population loss, increasing poverty, declining household incomes, retail vacancies and dead shopping malls,” wrote Aaron M. Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in a 2017 article in Governing magazine.

Max Krochmal, a U.S. history professor at the University of New Orleans, said inner ring suburbs that were established as havens for White flight eventually saw their residents move even farther from the urban core.

“But they didn't necessarily leave those spaces empty; other people moved into them,” Krochmal said. “And that included African Americans of a certain amount of means, White working class people who hadn't been able to get into that housing stock previously and, since the 1980s in particular, immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere.”

Indeed, immigration has been a major factor in keeping Jefferson Parish’s overall population steady, instead of falling. Kenner, for example, has become a magnet for immigrants from Latin America, to the point that it’s known throughout the region for its Hispanic restaurants and grocery stores.

“So looking at Jefferson Parish now, we have on the one hand places that you might think of as in decline or stagnating. And certainly maybe from its ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘Happy Days’ White history, that may be true,” Krochmal said. “But if you zoom out or switch perspective, we could think of Jefferson Parish as having become more accessible and more inclusive and more diverse, and that's why the population numbers have stayed the same rather than dropping.”

“What we see from history is that efforts to maintain homogeneous areas haven’t worked and come at a great human cost in terms of our social relations as a community.” 

Jeff Adelson contributed to this report.