Terrytown

A father names a subdivision after his son, and decades later Vietnamese grocery stores stand next to the original slab ranch houses. That wasn't a metaphor Paul Kapelow was aiming for in 1960 when he bought West Bank farmland and built one of Jefferson Parish's first master-planned suburbs. He called it Terrytown, after his son Terry. He put in Oakwood Mall, laid out streets, poured foundations for enough houses to hold a small city. It was the West Bank's answer to the Metairie subdivision boom happening across the river — proof you could build tract suburbs on both banks if somebody was willing to do it all at once. What came after is what makes it worth the drive down the Westbank Expressway now. Terrytown today is one of the most ethnically diverse communities in Jefferson Parish. The roughly 24,000 people who live there include large Vietnamese, Hispanic, and Filipino populations alongside families who've been there since the beginning. It's the layering that matters — the same curbs and carports, different languages in the driveways, different reasons for ending up just south of Gretna. You go to see what a 1960s suburb becomes when it doesn't stay frozen. The mall is now Oakwood Center. The streets still run where Kapelow drew them. The rest wrote itself.