Like the Vieux Carré itself, the cemeteries with their dense concentration of above-ground tombs, as well as the associated Catholic rituals of public funeral processions and All Saints' Day, provided an endless source of foreign commentary.

Constructing the Creole Identity

The early Creole cemeteries of New Orleans allow consideration of a slightly different development and transformation of the early burial ground as cultural landscape beyond religious use and local genealogical and patriotic commemoration. The city's unusual and complex history involving a rich mix of Native American, French, Spanish, and black African inhabitants made New Orleans an obvious exotic 'other' to the largely English-speaking northern European-based populations of the greater Unites States. With the influx of foreigners to the city after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, visitors experienced first-hand these cultural differences, leaving a legacy of observations in word and image. Beginning in the 1850s, the old 'Creole' or 'Catholic cemeteries' were frequently cited as among the most interesting attractions to be visited by foreigners. This culturally external activity of tourism must be considered in understanding the physical and perceptual transformation of these places through time.

By the late nineteenth century, older American cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York and New Orleans promoted their civic persona through the construction of rich, historically-based identities. These official narratives--part fact, part fiction--drew from local elements including race and ethnicity, social customs, language, music, cuisine, art and architecture. Origin stories based on a dramatis persona of founding fathers and mothers set against a backdrop of historical locales, provided unique traditions that could be easily used to attract visitors and justify local political and economic development. It is within this construction of heritage that much of European and American preservation developed as a social and public movement.

Of the major historic American cities experiencing rapid growth and change during the nineteenth century, perhaps none was more successful in celebrating and promoting its uniqueness through a richly constructed heritage than New Orleans. This was based first and foremost on the construction of a Creole identity, whereby the city and its people were defined by real and imaginary historical characters, places, events, foods, music and stories that were consumed by increasingly mobile middle class visitors from Europe and the American north. With its confluence of French, Spanish, Indian, African and Caribbean traditions, New Orleans presented a complex and exotic cosmopolitan 'other' to Anglo or northern European visitors. This urbane cultural oddity was further exaggerated by the physical isolation, state of preservation, and appearance of the old Creole city or 'French Quarter' compared to the rapidly expanding 'American sector' after 1803.

The clearly defined grid of the original Franco-Hispanic city--its form and origin reflected in its moniker, Vieux Carré-- with its characteristic buildings, people, streets and lingering Old World customs, provided a concentrated and contained setting for exhibiting Creole culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, earlier city directories gave way to commercially produced guidebooks extolling the history and sights of the French Quarter, building on the popularization of the area established earlier through the Creole stories of George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn and Grace King. Depicted as a proud, stubborn, and doomed survivor, one guidebook described the Quarter as:

…very strange to Northern eyes… A little world, a world apart--in its habits, its recreations and mode of life and ideas…clinging still to the ancestral way and old ideals….Conservative no doubt it is; changing little, yet changing nevertheless; passively accepting to-day's innovations; yielding to the inevitable, to the irresistible pressure of improvements along its upper limits particularly.

No other city east of the Mississippi could boast of a resident population still so intimately associated with a traditional setting --the houses, shops, churches, squares, and streets and all the attending customs and life-ways-- associated with the past and the place.

Text adapted from Frank G. Matero, Dead Space: Defining the New Orleans' Creole Cemetery, Exhibit at Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, April 2002.