This was the original location of Milneburg, whose historic name has been revived by a modern neighborhood somewhat farther south.

 

Land was reclaimed from Lake Pontchartrain in an Orleans Levee Board project which began in the 1920s and was completed in the 1930s, creating the space now occupied by the neighborhood.

 

The Pontchartrain Beach amusement park, originally opened within the present-day Lake Terrace subdivision in the 1920s, moved to newly reclaimed land at the foot of Elysian Fields Avenue in the 1930s and remained a popular attraction through the early 1980s. It is now the site of the University of New Orleans Research and Technology Park, home to numerous corporate tenants, the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) and the UNO Advanced Technology Center office building. The waterfront Lake Terrace Drive and Lake Oaks Park are located in the neighborhood.

 

During World War II, the area included important war-effort facilities such as Higgins Industries shipyards, Camp Leroy Johnson, and a Naval air base called NAS New Orleans. NAS New Orleans later moved across the Mississippi River to Belle Chasse, and the site of the former naval air station was developed into the principal campus of the University of New Orleans.

 

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, while some homes and businesses flooded (especially those on and near Robert E. Lee Boulevard/Leon C. Simon Drive) the majority of the section – like the majority of the lakefront – escaped the disastrous post-Katrina flooding, by virtue of the higher elevation of this man-made land. After Katrina, the lakefront appeared as a slender, curiously undamaged, and almost wholly recovered zone adjacent to the much-lower-lying and hard-hit Lakeview and Gentilly neighborhoods on the other side of Robert E. Lee Boulevard/Leon C. Simon Drive.

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