St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

A fire redesigned New Orleans, and this is where the city decided to put its dead afterwards.

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 opened in 1789, replacing the older St. Peter Cemetery as the main burial ground when the city was laid out again following the fire of 1788. St. Peter's no longer exists. This one has been in continuous use ever since, which makes it the oldest and among the most prominent cemeteries in New Orleans.

It sits eight blocks from the Mississippi, on the north side of Basin Street, one block beyond the inland edge of the French Quarter, bordering the former Iberville Projects. Most of the graves are above-ground vaults built through the 18th and 19th centuries, which is the form New Orleans burial took and the reason these cemeteries look the way they do. Numbers 1 and 2 are both on the National Register of Historic Places and on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

The names inside carry a great deal of the city's history. Etienne de Boré, a wealthy pioneer of the sugar industry and the first mayor of New Orleans, is here. So is Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. Ernest Dutch Morial, the first African-American mayor of New Orleans, was interred here in 1989, though his family later built a tomb at St. Louis No. 3 and he was reinterred there.

The cemetery is still owned and run by the Catholic archdiocese, alongside its other New Orleans grounds, with an office handling family services, memorialisation, and preservation and restoration work.

You cannot simply wander in. St. Louis No. 1 is open for tours rather than for general access, run by the non-profit Save Our Cemeteries and by commercial operators for a fee. Check the current arrangement before you go, because it has changed before.