Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Drop acid and do it in the cemetery

We visited a New Orleans cemetery in the Garden district in March (down the street from Emeril's first stomping grounds, the Commander's Palace. BAM.) When you drive from the airport, one of the first things you see are a whole bunch of modern, above ground cemeteries. The one we saw dates back to the 1800s.




Cemeteries are above ground because New Orleans is below sea level. You may know this bit of information from a little thing called Hurricane Katrina. At first, they would bury the dead by trying to weigh down coffins with stones, or bore holes in the wood, but inevitably, the bodies would pop up, and then everyone would get sick because of yellow fever and other fun, old timey diseases like that. So, they settled for the Spanish style of cemetery- the vault.



The body is placed in a family tomb when the person dies on the top shelf. After a year of decomposing, the body is then pushed down into a hole in the back and falls into a pile that is your dead lineage. If two people die in the same family in the same year, they have these temporary vaults where you sit for a year.



The best thing about old cemeteries is seeing the great last names that probably disappeared when that person died- like the "Apffel", "Egdorff" or "Guth"- or seeing last names that are so New Orleanian- "Deshautreaux" "Sirjacques" and "Abade".



Societies like the Masons and others would build massive tombs. They also had charity tombs for the free black people and orphans. Probably would have been cooler to just give them the money when they were alive, but whatevs.

1 comment:

morepunx said...

I've been to this cemetary!