Mary :: Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, The Garden District, New Orleans

When I was in New Orleans, one of the things I was really interested in was touring an old cemetery. The old historic cemeteries there have above-ground tombs and I thought it would be interesting to learn more about why that is. Also, I know some people find it morbid, but when I toured Graceland Cemetery in Chicago I learned so much about Chicago history. I thought it’d be a cool alternative way to learn more about New Orleans, too.

The closest cemetery to where we were staying is St. Louis No. 1 in the northern part of the French Quarter. I thought it’d be easy enough to walk up there and then spend a while after going to the cemetery in Louis Armstrong Park. However, I read online that the cemetery and the park are near the projects and that the cemetery, with its twists and turns can have isolated areas and that there weren’t tons of people in the park most times, no matter how beautiful it is and basically, that you shouldn’t go at it alone, just to be safe. Now, I know that sometimes things can be overblown online, but since I *was* alone, I didn’t really want to chance it. I called a tour group that goes to the cemetery, because that seemed like the thing to do if you don’t want to go on your own, but the tour times didn’t work for me. Then I realized that there was another similar cemetery called Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, in another part of town, the Garden District, and that I could take a cab ride over and get on a tour of that cemetery. So, that’s what I did. And since I was going on a tour sponsored by Save our Cemeteries, I felt kind of good because I knew my money would actually be used to help keep the cemetery up and that I’d be dealing with people who actually care about the cemetery, as opposed to someone just trying to get rich off tourists.

So, I took a cab to the address. It was a cool day, but the sun was out. I was early so I just hung out by the cemetery entrance, hoping I didn’t look too weird, like a girl hanging out in the cemetery. A few people walked by, there was a busy restaurant across the street. I saw restaurant workers going to work. There were some construction guys working on something. And then a woman walked up. She introduced herself. Her name was Mary and she was originally from England. She was my tour guide. We chit chatted waiting for more people to show up. No one did. She said pre-Hurricane Katrina, she’d have anywhere from 15 – 20 people on her tours and now sometimes no one shows up. Sad, but for $5, I got a personal tour.

Mary was boiling over with information about Lafayette Cemetery and we slowed walked through. Respectfully, she told me about different tombs, different features of them, how they worked, how the people related to New Orleans history, the different construction materials and styles, and pretty much everything I ever wanted to know. She was patient and when I had questions she answered them. I didn’t even have to raise my hand. heh. After about an hour, she begged off and let me stay to take a few more photos and to look a little more on my own.

It’s been a while, but here are the things I remember about the tour that have stuck with me:

• Lafayette used to be a separate city from New Orleans.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is more popular (because it’s in the French Quarter?), but more movies are shot at Lafayette Cemetery. Among them, Double Jeopardy and Interview with a Vampire.
• Above-ground tombs in New Orleans cemeteries are often called “cities of the dead.”
• New Orleans is well below sea level and mostly swampy land naturally, so the tombs were built above ground so they wouldn’t wash out. In addition, above ground tombs are not out of the ordinary in the home countries of some of the people who are buried there. Like the Spanish and French.
• I always wondered how the tombs work and how they can fit so many people in them. If you see one open, it has shelves in it. Someone dies, their coffin is slid in an put on the shelf. The tomb is sealed up, their name is put on the tomb, and then there’s a law that it can’t be opened for about a year. Someone else dies, they take the existing coffin off the top shelf, put it down one, and put the new coffin on the top shelf. Eventually, if there are more coffins than shelves, they remove the remains from the oldest coffin and put them in the bottom of the tomb, in the ground. At that point there are only bones and hair so it doesn’t take up much room. In this way, they can keep just about an endless number of bodies in a tomb. Probably run out of room for names before you’d run out of space inside.
• If two people die in less than a year and the tomb cannot be opened, there are walls of temporary holding vaults where the most recently deceased can go. When the year is up and the tomb can be opened, then they’ll meet their final resting space.
• Being buried in these tombs isn’t just a thing of the past. People still do it today.
• The cemetery has always been non-segregated and non-denominational, so you’ll find tombs of all sorts of people: Germans, Spanish, French, Irish, Italians, English, African, Catholics, Jews, etc.
• There are a lot of graves from people who died from the yellow fever outbreak. More than 41,000 people died in the epidemic.

When I was through, I took out the card that my cab driver had given me and called up the cab company to take me back to the hotel. It seemed like this was a common practice in New Orleans and that all the cabs had cards and you could take them and use them to call and pick you up wherever you were. The cab driver on the way home was really talkative. He was getting called to do a “Katrina tour” which he said was really good money, but he told me he’d already done one that day and basically all they do is pick up tourists and drive through the hurricane-ravaged areas for hours. He said he can only take doing that so many times in a day, no matter what the pay.

More on Flickr.

Note: I discovered a bunch of unpublished photos from our trip to New Orleans back in December. I’ll be publishing those photos today.

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