Kenner Rivertown Historic District

Sixteen blocks along the Mississippi levee in Kenner hold the remains of a city founded in 1855 on three plantation properties—Oakland, Belle Grove, and Pasture—by Minor Kenner. Everything north of what became Airline Highway was swampland. From 1915 to 1931, a streetcar line connected this stretch to New Orleans, running between Rampart and Canal downtown and Williams Boulevard and Jefferson Highway here. The tracks are gone. The district earned designation as a Louisiana Main Street community.

What's here now: the Rivertown Repertory Theatre, Kenner Heritage Park, the Kenner Planetarium with its MegaDome Cinema, and the Rivertown Science Center. A life-sized NASA International Space Station prototype sits among them—the improbable artifact of a suburb that decided preservation could mean more than keeping storefronts standing.

Near the river end of Williams Boulevard, a monument marks where "Gypsy" Jem Mace defeated Tom Allen on May 10, 1870, for the heavyweight championship of the bare-knuckle boxing era. Go for the space station prototype. Stay because Kenner has always been a place where unlikely things happen at the edge of the water.