New Orleans has always respected the dead, but this isn’t the reason the tombs of our departed loved ones are interred above ground. Early settlers in the area struggled with different methods to bury the dead. Burial plots are shallow in New Orleans because the water table is high. Dig a few feet down, and the grave becomes soggy, filling with water. The casket will literally float. You just can’t keep a good person down!

The early settlers tried by placing stones in and on top of coffins to weigh them down and keep them underground. Unfortunately, after a rainstorm, the rising water table would literally pop the airtight coffins out of the ground. To this day, unpredictable flooding still lifts an occasional coffin out of the ground in those areas generally considered safe from flooding and above the water table.

Shannon Lee Dawdy, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, worked with FEMA from October-December 2005 to record the damage done to the city’s 20 National Historic Register Districts. In the article, she reflects on both Katrina’s destruction and the numerous other disasters in New Orleans’ past – 6 major hurricanes and floods, two major fires, and 3 yellow fever and cholera epidemics – and how after each, New Orleans rebuilt.

In 1722, just after the first French buildings were constructed, New Orleans experienced a major hurricane. Le Blond de La Tour, the city’s first engineer, saw it as a rebuilding opportunity, saying

“All these buildings were old and provisionally built, and not a single one was in the alignment of the new city and thus would have had to be demolished.”

Interestingly, most of the buildings that make up the French Quarter were constructed in the Spanish colonial (1769-1803) and American periods (post 1803). About 80% of the French structures burned to the ground with a devastating fire of 1788.

For more info on Katrina’s effect on New Orleans’ cemeteries, visit SaveOurCemeteries.org

The entire cemetery is built above the ground because the ground is too wet [to bury bodies]. There are huge crypts and walls that are covered with tombs. Everything above ground. What is significant about this cemetery is that the cultures are mixed, all in one. The French, Spanish, African-American. It’s divided into three squares and one entire square is divided into free people of colour: this is where you’ll find a lot of notable names in jazz, politics, and the military that make this site unique.

That said, I can’t tell you exact names yet: this is the main reason we’re going. The site has never been mapped before, and now it’s in real disarray. The restorers will fully map the site, note down the names, and decipher damages that the cemetery suffered before and during the hurricane.”

Save Our Cemeteries is a non-profit devoted to promoting, preserving, and protecting New Orleans’ 31 historic cemeteries. You can view info about the known damages to different cemeteries on their Local Cemetery Conditions Following Hurricane Katrina page.

At this time in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, more information is becoming available regarding the fate of the Metairie and other landmark cemeteries located in the flood area. At one historic above-ground cemetery in the Garden District known as Lafayette No. 1, uprooted magnolia trees destroyed part of a 200-year-old wall believed to contain human remains. This is across the street from the home which once belonged to Anne Rice. In Placquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, coffins, crypts, and remains have been strewn about. Coffins have found their way into trees and living rooms, while remains have “taken a walk.” The fifteen cemeteries of the parish were ripped up by the hurricane, which floated coffins from the above-ground crypts favored because of the high water table and lack of real soil. In some cases 3,000-pound crypts were flung from one bank to the Mississippi to the other by the high winds. (source: Yahoo News)

New Orleans cemeteries are unique. Although they are similar to those in Paris and Mexico City, they differ in one important respect. While the structures in other cemeteries are usually memorials with remains interred in crypts below ground, the above-ground tombs and wall vaults in New Orleans cemeteries are actual resting places of remains. As bodies decay along with their lime-and-shell mortared dwellings, the rubble becomes mixed with bone fragments, sea shells, and teeth. Possibly this is one reason New Orleans cemeteries are referred to as “cities of the dead.” Cemeteries here are also plentiful, steeped in history and lore. This makes them great tourist attractions.

Learn more about New Orleans cemeteries and burial practices at ExperienceNewOrleans.com.

The images on this page were made in 1999 at the Metairie Cemetery. They were taken on Kodak high-contrast Tech-Pan 35 mm film with an SLR. Angels in New Orleans possess a tremendous character, and closely resemble in style those in Pere Lechaise, the famous garden cemetery in Paris. For the most part, the statuary here is uniquely carved, and each has a story. “Lost at Sea” is a larger-than-life-sized pair of marble angels atop a mausoleum, being commissioned by a New Orleans businessman who lost his wife and daughter at sea in the late 1800s. “Forlorn Guardian” is a name I gave to the angel near the main entrance.

Metairie is the first suburb of New Orleans, located on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and has sustained flooding and damage in the Katrina disaster. For a period of time after Katrina withdrew, the water line was several feet high on some of the mausoleums and tombs. Usually resplendent with flowering magnolias and pancake-smooth lawns, the grounds were caked in mud and a carpet of dead leaves. Cain Burdeau (Associated Press) wrote on September 17 that the low-lying city’s policy of interring its dead in above-ground tombs appears to have paid off, but cautioned that the full extent of damage is still unknown. The city’s position at or below sea level makes digging graves all but impossible. Many of the cemeteries are in a cluster of private and public grounds near where a flood wall on the 17th Street Canal was breached by the storm surge.

Metairie, the most famous of New Orleans’ “above-ground cemeteries,” holds the remains of Gen. Richard Taylor, P. T. G. Beauregard and monuments dedicated to the Louisiana Division of the Army of Tennessee, Louisiana Division of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the Washington Artillery, all Confederate forces. The cemetery lies northwest of the Beauregard house, closer to the middle of the city. Recent aerial photographs of the cemetery (showing tombs and monuments inundated) can be seen on Flickr.

Contact Information:

Lake Lawn Metairie Cemetery
5100 Pontchartrain Blvd.
New Orleans, LA 70124
504-486-6331
http://www.stewartenterprises.com/story/metairie.cfm