Look closely at New Orleans cemeteries, and you will find love, beauty, and a lot of dead people organized by money, class, and religion. New Orleans’ cemeteries are famously called “Cities of the Dead” for their architectural resemblance to an actual city. The tombs are arranged in rows, just like houses on a street, and a cemetery’s dense skyline resembles an old neighborhood filled with shotgun doubles. The cemeteries do more than just resemble an actual city; they are also organized like a city with a combination of inexpensive apartments, gated communities, posh condominiums, and single-family dwellings. Death might be a great equalizer, but not in New Orleans.
Perhaps it is this paradox, along with the picturesque beauty, that drives everyone’s interest in cemeteries. Photographers, tourists, and preservation students all take their turns in the cemeteries, and they inevitably ask the same things: Why are the cemeteries falling apart? Who is responsible for them? What can be done? The answers to these questions can be slightly complicated, and solutions are often slow. After the photographers lose interest and the tourists go home, it is left to the citizens of New Orleans to take interest and take action.
There are some inconvenient truths to cemetery preservation: it is hard and dirty work, it can be expensive, and few people want to pay for it because it mostly benefits dead people. The question about tomb responsibility falls to the owners, and tomb ownership can get complicated. A tomb or coping is owned by a family or individual, and the cemetery is operated by a larger group. In New Orleans, most of the cemeteries are either operated by the Catholic Archdiocese, the City of New Orleans, a private association, or a congregation. Families would purchase plots from these various operators and then erect a tomb or coping on their plot. Sometimes, families would join a fraternal organization, pool their money, and erect a society tomb on a large plot (these are the “condominiums”). Due to the reusable nature of New Orleans’ tombs, one tomb could serve multiple generations of an extended family. Families would perform basic maintenance of tombs on November 1, or All Saints Day, a day when they would limewash the tomb and visit lost loved ones. However, as families died off, intermarried, or moved away, tombs were forgotten and fell into disrepair.
Cemeteries used to have sextons, or men who worked in the cemetery daily to maintain the grounds, perform burials, and keep records, but only the private cemeteries have such roles now. It has never been the responsibility of cemetery operators like the Archdiocese to maintain individual tombs, but as tombs were abandoned, the operators often had to step in. Perpetual care policies were created to circumvent this issue: tomb owners purchase a perpetual care policy from the cemetery operator, and the operator takes care of the maintenance in perpetuity. Historically, tombs fared better when their individual owners maintained them. As cemetery operators were left in charge of maintaining more real estate, the conditions of tombs declined further. Some remedial maintenance work, often done with the best of intentions, was completed with inappropriate methods and materials, leading to worse problems.
Today, if someone is interested in preserving a tomb, they first have to determine who owns it. If the tomb happens to be located in a private cemetery, the task is much simpler, as these operators have well-organized ownership records. If ownership records are unclear or non-existent, then a person must find the name of the tomb’s first owner/builder, then trace the line of descendants. Then, they submit a notarized copy of this family tree to the cemetery operator along with a letter explaining intentions to repair the tomb. It must include an estimate for the repair work. The cemetery operator will then issue a permit. How do you get an estimate for cemetery repair work? That goes back to one of our original, inconvenient truths: cemetery work is hard, dirty, and it can be expensive, and there are therefore not that many qualified people who do it.
There are currently four small contractors in the New Orleans area with experience in cemetery preservation, and these contractors can legally work in any cemetery. Cemetery work, like anything in New Orleans, can get personality-driven, and not every contractor is willing to work in every cemetery. If a tomb is in a Catholic cemetery or a private cemetery, there’s also the option to hire those maintenance crews directly. If a tomb is in a City-owned cemetery, a contractor is the only option. There is no licensing for cemetery work, but a contractor should generally have experience, be familiar with traditional materials, and carry the necessary insurance.
Perhaps the most important aspect of cemetery preservation work is the choice of materials. The historic tombs, like many of our historic buildings, are mostly built of soft red bricks and generally include a lime-rich mortar with a lime or cement-based stucco. It is important to repoint the brick with lime mortar, and avoid adding inappropriately hard, cement-based materials. Historic tombs should not be painted with latex paint. The latex paint prevents the brick structure from “breathing,” or allowing water vapor to evaporate through the walls. The traditional method of coating a tomb with a limewash or mineral coating works best.
When individual families still maintained tombs, they often chose vibrant limewashes (particularly in the Catholic cemeteries), and the Cities of the Dead were nearly as colorful as the neighborhoods of the living. Once family maintenance dwindled and perpetual care policies increased, the prevalence of whitewash and white paint also grew, as it was much easier and less expensive for cemetery operators to use white on everything. The monochromatic cemeteries that we see now date to about 1920.
Not every historic cemetery includes elaborate tombs. Traditional Jewish cemeteries include copings and headstones so that their members can be buried in-ground, which is part of the Jewish tradition. Holt Cemetery, owned by the City, also includes copings and in-ground burials. A coping is a short, rectangular structure that is built anywhere from six inches to 30 inches above the ground, and infilled with dirt. The coping allows for an in-ground burial, even if the ground itself is slightly above grade. Families can reuse copings, but the “exchange” process, or removal of old remains and burial of new remains, is admittedly harder and messier with copings.
Tombs are remarkably well-designed, stout little structures that allow for efficient body decomposition and disposal, and they surprisingly don’t smell bad from the outside. Generally, a single-family tomb will have a top vault separated by a slate shelf from a bottom vault, and then iron bars separating the bottom vault from the caveau, or basement. Put a body in the bottom vault, let nature take its course, and it will eventually fall into the basement. Put a body in the top vault, wait at least a year and a day, and then (if necessary), take the body out and move it to the caveau. Why move a body? In the 19th century, especially during the Yellow Fever epidemics, families would lose many people within a short time, so the burial vaults had to be cleared out and reused as quickly as possible. Today, bodies still have to be moved around so that vaults can be reused, and the year-and-a-day minimum waiting period still applies (although more time is always better). If a family runs out of available space in their single-family tomb, they can rent a wall-vault or “apartment” from the cemetery operator until space clears up.
There is a common misconception that New Orleans residents must bury all their dead above ground because traditional, six-feet-under burials would hit the water table. That’s mostly incorrect. In some parts of the city, the ground might be saturated at that depth, but the tradition of burying above ground comes from French and Spanish traditions, and other, higher-ground cities in the United States like Mobile, Ala. and Brownsville, Texas have similar tombs.
As someone who works in cemeteries, I have admittedly been asked some strange questions. I have been asked to remove names from marble headstones due to family squabbles; the answer was no. I have been asked to put an asphalt shingle roof on a tomb so that the “inhabitants” would stay dry; that answer was also no. Proper cemetery preservation does not include such bold measures, and it often begins with rudimentary maintenance. Go visit your family tomb. Pull the small weeds and clean the tomb (a soft-bristle brush and diluted Dawn soap works just fine). Be very gentle with the marble. If there are more serious problems, contact the cemetery operator. The best way to preserve the beautiful cemeteries of New Orleans is for the living to pay more attention to them.
