St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 opened in 1789 when the city's first burial ground filled up after fire and epidemic, on swampy ground outside the fortification walls; the ordinance that pushed New Orleans burials above ground made it into the necropolis visitors know, a compressed grid of family tombs, society tombs, and wall vaults. Its roster of burials tracks the city's history: the Haitian refugee influx after the revolution, the sections set aside for African Americans and free people of color, which is why it sits on the state's African American Heritage Trail. It is most famous for one tomb: the Laveau-Glapion vault where Marie Laveau, the Vodou queen of nineteenth-century New Orleans, was buried in 1881, and where pilgrims have left offerings since her death.

Since 2015 the archdiocese has kept the gate: the cemetery is open to the public only through its authorized tour operator, after years of vandalism that culminated in the 2013 pink-painting of Laveau's tomb and a costly restoration. The X marks that tourists scratched into the plaster in hopes of a wish granted were never tradition, and preservationists and Vodou practitioners alike condemn them as grave damage. What remains inside is the real article: a burial ground still holding its dead, visited on a tour, behind a locked gate, in a city where the dead are neighbors.

Visiting

New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries governs access, and tours run only through its authorized operator, booked ahead; the cemetery closes on Mardi Gras Day.

Photo: [Infrogmation](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StLouisCem1MarieLaveau1.jpg), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5.