Even in death, the cultural traditions and distinctions of Catholic Creole versus Protestant American were preserved and reinforced.

Creation of the Modern Creole Cemetery

New Orleans' earliest burial grounds were established in close proximity to the young city, first along the high ground of the natural levee, and later in designated lots outside the city limits but according to the projected urban grid. According to early accounts and archaeological investigation, interment for most of the early population was below ground, the disadvantages being obvious during periods of flooding. According to earlier European traditions, only the clergy and citizens of the highest status warranted burial within the sacred precinct of the parochial church. In 1789, after two previous relocations due to city expansion, the cemetery was finally moved outside the city ramparts in cleared and drained land known as the King's Commons between the inhabited city and the cypress swamps of Lake Pontchartrain beyond. The result of European civil and ecclesiastical policies responding to urban crowding and the fear of disease and a disastrous flood and Yellow Fever epidemic the year before, the city reassigned the dead to an extramural realm away from the living in terrain traditionally associated with the undesirable, unhealthy, and dangerous. Here outside the ramparts were located the city's drainage canals, as well as the expansive cypress and palmetto swamp. By the late eighteenth century, Baron Carondelet's commercial canal and basin were constructed on the southeastern perimeter of the new cemetery and efforts were made to drain the swamp. Later in the early nineteenth century, with the development of the surrounding neighborhood into the Faubourg Tremé, the cemetery would find itself encroached yet again, this time by housing, lumber warehouses and later, by train sheds, earning it the name, “the backyards”. By the turn of the century, the area around the St. Louis cemeteries became home to the social fringes of society through the legalization of prostitution in the neighborhood labeled "The District" or Storyville.

The new Creole cemetery, as first realized at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, was located outside the city ramparts, a short distance from the fortified northwest gate. The site, originally aligned along the northern rampart and oriented with the city grid, was defined and enclosed by first a wooden palisade and later a high brick wall, portions of which doubled as tiered brick burial vaults. The location of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and later St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 (1823) north of the city conveniently avoided, if only temporarily, encroachment by later urban development along the river to the west and east. This first extramural cemetery, laid out in rowed clusters, was later refined and regularized at St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 as a carefully conceived plan of four ordered squares extending and responding to the city grid with a hierarchy of alleys and well-placed monuments and tombs of exceptional design. Like its more renowned French counterpart, Père La Chaise, opened in 1804 in response to the burial requirements of Napoleonic law, both cemeteries reflected earlier and current reform efforts to create hygienic, planned burial precincts outside yet nearby the city to allow regular visitation, and to provide individual rather than common graves. Unlike Père La Chaise, whose picturesque garden-like atmosphere was quickly transformed by the dense erection of monuments, New Orleans' St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, was laid out in a grid-like fashion allowing easy accommodation for the inevitable accumulation and build-up of tombs over time. This linear arrangement also countered earlier burial placement according to wealth and rank, and was reflective of egalitarian and rationalist sentiments of the late eighteenth century.

While many of the tomb designs in the Saint Louis cemeteries reference the prevailing taste and symbolism of those in contemporary French cemeteries during the early decades of the nineteenth century, the undeniable advantages of above-ground burial in a city below sea-level caused the form of these personal chapel tombs to be adapted into true burial vaults. In this case, the chapel space originally designed for the veneration of the deceased by the living gave way to housing the dead many times over through recycled above-ground vault space, an advantage not to be lost in a city with limited land for burial. Early nineteenth century views and descriptions of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 suggest early burial here was on or below grade resulting in the characteristic low lying platform or stepped tombs. With the popularization of European tomb designs, and especially those from France, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 was quickly transformed, creating in this process of adaptation, a new typology of mortuary monuments on American soil.

No doubt the specific design and construction of these tombs were the result of input from client, designer, and craftsman and reflective of available materials, personal taste and prevalent traditions, as well as social status and economic means. Nevertheless, local customs still predominated, and all but the most expensive of tombs were constructed of stucco-covered brick like the Creole buildings of the city. Reflecting the same architectural differences observed between the Creole quarter and the American sector, exposed brick tombs of imported hard fired red brick are only to be found in the reserved Protestant section of Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. Even in death, the cultural traditions and distinctions of Catholic Creole versus Protestant American were preserved and reinforced. Similar to the necessary expansion of growing households, tombs were often modified to accommodate additional vaults and hybrid types were eventually created reflecting and anticipating additional stories and excessively tall parapet fronts.

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.