NEW ORLEANS – Hurricane Katrina has transformed the legendary New Orleans cemeteries, known as “cities of the dead,” into a brown landscape of muck and stench. But fears that floodwaters would send large numbers of coffins and corpses floating away from their crypts were largely unfounded.
One coffin apparently displaced by the flood was found on railroad tracks near Greenwood Cemetery, but the low-lying city’s policy of interring the dead in above-ground tombs appears to have paid off.
At Metairie Cemetery, 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 dead leaves.
Metairie Cemetery is the burial spot for many of the city’s most famous sons and daughters, including William C.C. Claiborne, the first U.S. governor of Louisiana, the Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, jazz musicians Louis Prima and Al Hirt, and baseball Hall of Famer Mel Ott.
The scene was desolate at the nearby Holt Cemetery, which was established in the 1800s as a potter’s field for people who died with no money to pay for a burial. Holt is unique among the city’s cemeteries because the graves are underground, and because many are decorated with folk art.
Even before Katrina, Holt was a chaotic place where strangers shared caskets and headstones leaned to and fro. The cemetery’s records are so spotty that historians don’t even know where Buddy Bolden, the jazz pioneer, was buried.
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