THE CEMETERIES OF NEW ORLEANS: A CULTURAL HISTORY
The Cemeteries of New Orleans reveals the origins and evolution of the Crescent City’s world-famous necropolises, exploring both their distinctive architecture and their cultural impact. Spanning centuries, this fascinating body of research takes readers from muddy fields of crude burial markers to extravagantly designed cities of the dead, illuminating a vital and vulnerable piece of New Orleans’s identity.
Where many histories of New Orleans cemeteries have revolved around the famous people buried within them, Dedek focuses on the marble cutters, burial society members, journalists, and tourists who shaped these graveyards into internationally recognizable emblems of the city. In addition to these cultural actors, this exploration of cemetery architecture reveals the impact of ancient and medieval grave traditions and styles, the city’s geography, and the arrival of trained European tomb designers, such as the French architect J. N. B. de Pouilly in 1833 and Italian artist and architect Pietro Gualdi in 1851.
The nineteenth century was a particularly critical era in the city’s cemetery design. Notably, the cemeteries embodied traditional French and Spanish precedents, until the first garden cemetery—the Metairie Cemetery—was built on the site of an old racetrack in 1872. Like the older walled cemeteries, this iconic venue served as a lavish expression of fraternal and ethnic unity, a backdrop to exuberant social celebrations, and a destination for sightseeing excursions. During this time, cultural and religious practices, such as the celebration of All Saints’ Day and the practice of Voodoo rituals, flourished within the spatial bounds of these resting places. Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, episodes of neglect and destruction gave rise to groups that aimed to preserve the historic cemeteries of New Orleans—an endeavor, which is still wanting for resources and political will.
Containing ample primary source material, abundant illustrations, appendices on both tomb styles and the history of each of the city’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cemeteries, The Cemeteries of New Orleans offers a comprehensive and intriguing resource on these fascinating historic sites.
Baton Rouge: The Louisiana State University Press 2017.
Link to publisher: https://lsupress.org/books/detail/cemeteries-of-new-orleans/
"The garlands we hang upon the tombs are perishable; the wreathes will fade and the flowers decay; but the festival is born of human motives and better purposes. It revives the memories of examples past, and helps sustain our hopes of better lives in the future. It brings the spirits of the living and the dead in close sympathy." - All Saints', Daily Picayune, 1869.
Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated with old cemeteries. They are picturesque churchyards that chronicle birth and death on leaning slabs of slate and marble; they are lonely fields of mostly forgotten gravestones and monuments tucked away among weeds on the old back streets of cities and towns; they are beautiful, manicured parks, architectural galleries of tombs and monuments displaying styles and decoration from throughout the ages in marble and granite; they are sprawling sculpture gardens guarded by triumphant stone angels created at a time when death was commemorated with artistry, taste, and elegance. - Peter Dedek