Cities of the Dead, a Cure for the Living

Over a year ago, I wrote a post about a project Nicholas and I undertook jointly for the New Orleans non-profit Save Our Cemeteries. We had been enlisted to, respectively, take photographs and write text for an SOC guide to the so-called "Canal Cemeteries"; the set of cemeteries that cluster around the end of Canal Street toward the Orleans/Jefferson Parish line.

I recently came across that post when searching for some photographs and had the realization that, despite my promise at the end of it, I had not posted any of the pictures Nicholas took or discussed any of the fun facts I learned while writing the guide. I'm happy to exhibit a little follow through, even if it's late in coming. It is actually well-timed as a recent move north has occasioned no little amount of homesickness on my part. I eagerly take the opportunity to write about my beloved adopted hometown until I can rejoin her and heal this New Orleans-shaped hole in my heart.

First, get the historic lay of the land by following this link to see an 1863 map of New Orleans. Click at the very center of the map for a close-up view and you will see Canal Street radiating northwest off of the Mississippi River (this is distinct from and above the more immediately visible "New Canal"). Trace Canal Street up into the cypress swamps and you will see that the street terminated at a racetrack and a plot of ground simply labeled "graveyard". In the early part of the 19th-century, prior to the creation of this map, a potter's field (cemetery for the indigent), at least one Jewish cemetery and several society cemeteries occupied plots of land in this area. It is unclear to me whether (1) the single word "graveyard" is meant to indicate all of these cemeteries, or (2) this map was based on an earlier map, when the land had been purchased by the societies and congregations, but only the potter's field was actively being used. In any event, this map gives one a good indication of how relatively remote these cemeteries were at their inception.

As in the 19th-century, you can still ride the Canal streetcar from the river to its termination at Metairie Road. These days the cypress swamps are gone. You will instead see a grand commercial boulevard give way to blocks of more residential, sometimes ill-repaired, but often still-stately buildings. Those in turn give way to a half-dozen cemeteries; park-like and quiet, a few decaying and sequestered, others open and serene, all of them crowded together along with the Hope Mausoleum, an austere art deco edifice constructed in 1931, whose marble corridors stay invitingly cool even in the middle of an intense south Louisiana summer. (Photo below by Scott Webb. View his photo blog here.)

Which reminds me: we tackled this project during the middle of summer. It was, obviously, hot and humid, but we came prepared with water, sunscreen and a high tolerance (dare I say love? yes) for heat. Live oak trees also grow in several of the cemeteries providing periodic shade as we took our notes and pictures, walking up and down the rows of tombs (distinct from headstones - tombs are not simply markers of a burial, but contain the burial).


We were charged with writing up/photographing only a portion of the cemeteries that now crown Canal Street. St. Patrick No. 1 is administered by the Archdiocese of New Orleans and nearby Metairie Cemetery, which stands on the site of the former racetrack mentioned above*, is owned and administered by a private company. The remainder - the Charity Hospital, Gates of Prayer, Cypress Grove, Odd Fellows Rest and Greenwood Cemeteries - do have some society and, in the case of Gates of Prayer, congregational affiliations, but require the help of Save Our Cemeteries for preservation and promotional purposes. These were the five cemeteries upon which Nicholas and I focused.

Below is my triumphant Paint map where I have labeled all but the Charity Hospital Cemetery. For added clarity: Greenwood stretches above Metairie Road, out of the picture plain. Cypress Grove is the long, four-rowed tract that reaches down and touches I-10. Odd Fellows Rest is the tiny triangular-shaped plot in the armpit of Canal Street and Metairie Road. Gates of Prayer, peculiarly-shaped, lies perpendicular to Canal Street (as opposed to oblique, like Cypress Grove) and has a row of live oaks living along its entrance.

Charity Hospital Cemetery needs no labeling these days because of its hurricane-shaped Katrina Memorial. This long and narrow burying ground was the site of that potter's field mentioned above. For as long as it has been a cemetery (over 150 years), it has served as the final resting place of many of New Orleans' poor and nameless, hence its length of trees and lawn rather than tombs and grave markers. Hurricane Katrina occasioned, among so many other things, the closing of Charity Hospital, but also the interment on its cemetery site of many of the storm's unclaimed victims. The spot retains the Charity Hospital Cemetery gate (below), but now also serves as a memorial to that scarring event.

Since I'm at it, I include a few more shots of the Charity Hospital Cemetery from a humble human's perspective. The fence to the left of the main gate:

An unadorned path that spirals visitors into the eye of the storm:

Beyond the Katrina Memorial, in the direction of the highway, lies an expanse of lawn. The earth rises noticeably here due to generations of burials. At the right, you can also see over a wall and into the adjacent Cypress Grove Cemetery, specifically visible are the peaks of the neogothic Slark and Letchford tombs.

If you walk back out to Canal Street and head left, you will soon see the Egyptian revival columns that mark the entrance to Cypress Grove

Cypress Grove, along with Greenwood, are society cemeteries. "Society" in this case does not refer to people of a certain socio-economic status, an elevated sense of self-importance and corresponding fear of poor people. Rather, it refers to a community group, often formed by individuals of a shared profession or activity, which collects dues in order to provide something like a social safety net to its members and their families. Societies are frequently associated with cemeteries or individual tombs as members' funeral costs were among the expenses with which their families might expect to receive assistance.

In the case of Cypress Grove and Greenwood, the society in question is the Fireman's Charitable and Benevolent Association, which bought both plots of land in the mid-19th century and continues to own and administer the cemeteries. At the Association's inception, New Orleans' fire department was a volunteer service. I venture to guess it probably also had a higher mortality rate than some other volunteer activities, rendering assistance with funeral costs an appealing benefit to membership. These days you don't need to be a fireman to be buried in Cypress Grove or Greenwood - you just need the money for a plot - but you can certainly find a good number of firemen interred in both cemeteries, their tombs identifiable by the fire trucks and other fire-fighting accoutrements that grace them.

Greenwood is some 150 acres and well-maintained. Against its fence that lines Metairie Road, it displays a collection of very imposing, very recognizable tombs, including one topped by the figure of a firefighter and another mounted by a nearly life-sized elk. Frankly, Greenwood gets a lot of attention and is not nearly so quirky or interesting as the other Canal cemeteries, so I am going to pass over it in favor of Cypress Grove, some pictures of which follow.

The main walkway, disappearing toward Basin Street (and, less glamorously, I-10) in the distance:

Along a parallel walkway, stands the unadorned Soon on Tong tomb, identified by Chinese characters and the English words “Chinese Cemetery”.  The Soon on Tong tomb dates to 1904 and originally served as the temporary resting site for Chinese New Orleanians before their remains were shipped back to China:

I have not been able to find information regarding the Soon on Tong tomb's continued use, but the interior altar always looks as though someone had visited it in the fairly recent past:

Cypress Grove is also a great place to see some good old New Orleans cast iron, both in the fences and details:

And in a couple of the tombs themselves (the second tomb belongs to the Leeds family, which owned a large iron foundry in New Orleans):

Across the street from Cypress Grove Cemetery, next to an "herbal" smoke shop-cum-coffee bar, Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery huddles behind a high wall. Incidentally, it also contains an even more ornate rusty orange cast iron tomb:

 

Odd Fellows Rest was dedicated in 1849 by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.), an organization that, improbably to my ears, exists still. In the SOC Canal Cemeteries guide, I called Odd Fellows "charming and eclectic," a description I stand by. 

This is my favorite cemetery in New Orleans for its diminutive size, the uniqueness and artfulness of many of its tombs and for its verdant landscaping, concerted and incidental. Tribute to the former is a lovely, large citrus tree planted on a slight, undoubtedly man-made hill. The latter is represented by numerous live oaks that have broken the footing of tombs, dislodged chunks of concrete, grown around iron fences as though liquid:

And by plants that emerge from simply every possible crevice of the wall vaults, pathways and tombs:

Of course, this coin-like duality of the aesthetic decay of human creation and nature's indomitable fluorescence occurs all over New Orleans. However, it is on special display in Odd Fellows Rest where the cemetery backdrop, I think, provides an added commentary on the evanescence and vulnerability of all things human.

One of the largest tombs in Odd Fellows is the I.O.O.F. society tomb:

The ornate tablet at its center depicts a mother-child pair wreathed by a number of I.O.O.F. symbols whose meanings seem alchemical or zodiacal in their obscurity:

In addition to this society tomb, you can find in Odd Fellows a couple of Woodmen of the World tombs shaped, prosaically, like tree stumps. It also contains a precast concrete tomb that looks like a gingerbread house, a tiny grave marker adorned only by a water spigot, and an awkward but appealing relief bust of society founder and prison reformer, John Howard. As small as Odd Fellows Rest is, the arrangement of tombs and trees creates a "vignette" effect not dissimilar to that cultivated in classical Chinese gardens. There is no single spot from which you may see the entirety of the space. As you move through the cemetery, each turn provides a new, unexpected and lovely vantage point.  I always notice a new detail when I visit.

The last cemetery on our blog tour is Gates of Prayer. This Jewish burial ground abuts two relatively peculiar buildings. At the left, you have a mansion built in 1872 that was saved from utter dilapidation when some entrepreneur or other repurposed it as an event hall. At right, a dead end street paved with cobblestones, called Bottinelli Place, stretches away from Canal Street and ends with a three-story Italianate hybrid confection built by Teddy Bottinelli, in homage to his sculptor father, during the 1970s using stone and architectural details painstakingly brought to New Orleans from the Old Country.

Here you can see the paving stones on the street and a side view of the strange cupolaed building:

And here you can see how it punctuates the area all around it:

Gates of Prayer, established in 1846 as the Dispersed of Judah Cemetery, was renamed in the 1930s. Like Teddy Bottinelli's architectural dream that watches over it, Gates of Prayer accumulated more than it was created; the gate over its entrance declaring "Chevra Thilim Cemetery Assn" once stood on a side street and led to one of the many cemeteries annexed to achieve the present-day layout of Gates of Prayer.

A number of details distinguish Gates of Prayer from other New Orleans cemeteries. First, the interments here occurred below ground, so you will find grave stones rather than tombs. Next, all of the grave markers face the same direction - southeast. I have not been able to determine the reason, but this contrasts with most other New Orleans cemeteries where the tombs are arrayed more like houses on the city's notoriously aperpendicular streets and can face each other or sit at oblique angles to one another. Perhaps obviously, most of the grave stones also feature at least a portion of their inscription in Hebrew. Finally, while you will find the occasional urn or weeping willow common in Christian funerary symbolism, and even several Masonic symbols, you will also find a host of images specific to Judaic tradition, like menorahs:

Stars of David:

Or a pair of hands denoting a kohanim family:

Perhaps the most immediately visible grave marker in this cemetery is the Offner lighthouse.

Harry Offner was a local business-owner and onetime president of the non-profit, Lighthouse for the Blind.  His tombstone replicates that organization’s lighthouse-shaped building which still stands at 734 Camp Street in New Orleans' Central Business District.

That building itself was modeled after the Milneburg lighthouse which used to stand at the Pontchartrain lakefront:

And now lives, after an enlargement of the lantern room and many other events in its history, in a field at the end of Elysian Fields:

In poetic contrast to Harry Offner's grave stands that of Abe Shushan, buried near Offner. Shushan's marker is relatively unadorned, especially in comparison with a replica lighthouse, but the local landmark to which his legacy adheres is as well known, even grander and infinitely more notorious than the Milneburg lighthouse.

Abe Shushan was a prominent New Orleans businessman as well as a close confidante of Huey P. Long. As president of the Orleans Levee Board, Shushan lobbied for and built the gloriously deco New Orleans Lakefront Airport.  

Originally known as the Shushan Airport Terminal Complex, Shushan’s name was removed from the structure when he, like many, was drawn into the controversy surrounding Long and his political finances. In eloquent illustration of the man's hubris and of the city's desire to erase his association with the airport, Shushan's initials graced tiles, bathroom fixtures and so many other architectural details that it took years and thousands of dollars to literally remove his name from the structure. Shushan was convicted of tax evasion in 1939 and served some time in prison, but was later pardoned by President Truman. The airport retains its Shushan-less identity.

And that humorous yet sad story brings me to the end of our tour. I urge anyone whoever has the remotest opportunity of doing so to visit New Orleans, visit a New Orleans cemetery, visit any cemetery. You can learn a lot about the living there.

I wish I had a better way to wrap this up, but perhaps an abrupt and unprefaced ending suits a topic like cemeteries, so many of whose symbols involve broken, interrupted or cut things.


*In fact, one of the pathways through Metairie Cemetery echoes the oval racetrack.

"There is this rock breaches the earth..."*

On the North Shore of Massachusetts, some 30 miles northeast of Boston, an oblong of land called Cape Ann projects into the Atlantic Ocean. (1878 lithograph at right, apparently a balloon view, of Cape Ann with Boston in the distance, care of the Cape Ann Museum.) The Agawam tribe, belonging to the Eastern Algonquian language group, occupied the area when Europeans began arriving. By 1617 three quarters of the Native Americans in Massachusetts had perished from a pestilence, probably European-delivered, against which they had no immunity. In 1623 when ships from the Dorchester Company, precursor to the Massachusetts Bay Company, began colonizing Cape Ann, the Agawams were so decimated they sought alliance with the colonizers, fearing regional enemies more than Puritans. They were, by the accounts I have found, absorbed into the colonizers' community and effectively disappeared. At any rate, there were no Cape Ann Agawams left to participate in King Philip's War come 1675.

Since this creepy beginning 400 years ago, (predominantly though not exclusively) white people have lived on the perimeter of this spit of land, sailing countless ships to and away from it. Cape Ann's most important industry for most of this time has been fishing. You know the old Gorton's Fish Sticks logo? That's actually the image of a cenotaph erected in Gloucester on Cape Ann in the 1920s (left). It commemorates the many local fishermen who went to sea and never returned.

Early Modern travel is one of my pet historical interests. None of my reading in any area is exhaustive or authoritative...with the possible exception of classic horror fiction. So I know the impressions I am about to offer owe a lot to imagination. That said, the things I have read about seafaring in this broad time period - among them, Moby Dick, In the Heart of the Sea, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language - all depict the people who made their living on and from the sea, as well as the families they left at port, as a little bit haunted.**

Elyssa East's Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town has added vividness to this impression. Her non-fiction portrait of Cape Ann, and especially Gloucester, is clearly subjective, shaped by East's personal reasons for venturing to this corner of land and for deciding to root around in its past. You can tell by her title that she thinks the place is a little spooky. According to East, more than one resident does, too.

One of America's oldest English settlements, Gloucester, occupies the southwest portion of Cape Ann. Rockport and some other small towns also share coastal space along what residents call "the island". At the interior of the island lies a 2,000-some acre woodland known as Dogtown.

This enigmatic place is not a national or state park, a designated recreation area or anything else so familiar. Much of it, privately and publicly owned, is protected against development by some sort of conservation program. However, the ownership of large tracts of Dogtown's acreage remains obscure, lost to bad record keeping, fires, the kinds of things that can happen to a city's legal documents over 400 years of life. The extant records relating to Dogtown real estate do not help matters either. Surveyors created these documents so long ago that they demarcate plots by referencing landmarks that no longer exist, that have not existed for over 100 years.

Before its reclaiming by forest, Dogtown was a village. Over its 137-year history as a settlement (1693-1830), the place transitioned from the well-to-do Gloucester satellite known as the Commons Settlement, to Dogtown, a refuge for witches a.k.a. single women, people of color, the indigent; anybody at whom 19th-century New Englanders likely looked askance. As inland roads changed and Cape Ann's dynamic altered, Dogtown's homes fell into disrepair until finally, in 1830, the last resident of Dogtown, a freedmen named Cornelius Finson, fell ill and died.*** Since then strange occurrences, sometimes upsetting ones, and weird stories have accrued to it. Its reputation as a place of surreal beauty has also blossomed. 

Cape Ann has long fed the creativity of painters, poets and naturalists. East herself came to the island seeking the real-word subjects used by Marsden Hartley in his early-20th-century series of Dogtown paintings. (Mountains in Stone, 1931, below)

Dogtown, not only home to a ghost settlement, is a terminal moraine containing enormous boulders left when the Laurentide Ice Sheet began retreating a little over ten thousand years ago. These boulders characterize the area for locals - and its sense of enchantedness, as East would have it - even more than the remains of the defunct Commons Settlement do. Moreover, Dogtown's peculiar situation as a public/private real estate hybrid, long untended by anyone in particular, means that its young woods actually feel incredibly dense and even oppressive. There are no markers, paths get washed away and reformed. Hikers and other adventurers get lost or easily turned around there. Stories evidently circulate among Cape Ann locals of people walking into Dogtown and never returning.

As a tract of unsupervised land, Dogtown attracts the homeless, teenagers looking to get drunk, self-proclaimed witches, hunters, hikers, really anyone in search of something they can't find in "normal" densely-populated and urban coastal Massachusetts. A few people have killed themselves in those woods. A couple of people have been killed, too. None of these incidences affected the residents of Cape Ann as much as Anne Natti's murder on a rainy day in 1984.

East has reconstructed the elements of the murder and its aftermath with an artist's dogged attention to detail. I will not report it here, except to observe that it gives new meaning to describing a crime as "senseless". It is not hard to comprehend why residents would be peculiarly jarred by Natti's death. But East's real accomplishment is having crafted a non-fiction book that reads lyrically, responsibly, sensitively while drifting across genre boundaries as though they did not exist; I suppose reminding us they only exist in our minds. In Dogtown, she has blended autobiography, biography, art history, colonial history, ghost stories, literary history and true crime, and she has done it admirably. She has also made sure Gloucester and Dogtown are now high on my list of day trips to make while I live in Massachusetts.


*From poet Charles Olson's epic work Maximus, to Gloucester.
**I lived for a good while in New Orleans and am sensitive to the obnoxiousness of "horror" tourism and the romanticization of painful or troubled histories. And yet I suppose I am participating a little in that here.
***He did not die before being discovered in his illness and taken from his home in Dogtown to Gloucester's poor house by his "helpful" townie neighbors. Thanks, friends.

For more on books, visit me at Goodreads. Also check out Anita Diamant's Last Days of Dogtown.

The Winter Mouse and the Summer Mouse

Less than a year ago, Nicholas and I moved from New Orleans, Louisiana to Cambridge, Massachusetts so that Nicholas could attend graduate school on a well-funded university's dime. Despite trepidation at leaving a place we both love, the opportunity beckoned and we embarked on the adventure with lots of positive thinking. And did I mention trepidation?


Here's a gratuitous picture of sweaty Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski:

Part of our love for New Orleans involves its sunny, steamy, atmospheric weather; its long hot summers and short mild winters. We have both done time (and it felt like that) in, respectively, Wisconsin and Montana, so we had some idea what we were facing. We knew, moreover, that we could take it.

Oh how we just wished we didn't have to.

[Begin caveat]
Here I will observe that, despite its mundane reputation, the weather stands in that rare company of topics - accompanied by politics and religion - about which people get very emotional very quickly. As with those other notoriously volatile topics, people seem to believe that subjective feelings somehow merit being considered "correct" or "incorrect". Please understand this, loyal denizens of northern climes. I am not saying your long, cold, snowy winters are soul crushing in an objective way. Merely in my subjective one.

As an aside to my caveat,
[Aside] Because I have found some cold weather people can get a wee bit condescending, I would also like to observe that not liking cold weather does not make me a wuss any more than whining about being hot and sweaty makes you one. It means we're each in the wrong place.

As an aside to this aside,
[Aside to aside] To deal with another north-south prejudice: People in warm climates are not lazy. They just don't make such a production about working. They save that for living.

[Resume caveat]
My experience in climates of both relative extremes of hot and cold has taught me that the question of weather preference really boils down to one's body and how it runs. Some of us are arctic foxes and some of us are lizards. Sure, you can get used to anything. But what kind of weather really energizes you, elevates your mood and makes you love the outdoor world? I firmly believe we each have almost no control over this. It is something in us. Possibly it relates to where we first experienced the world and, therefore, what we took as our baseline.

I was born and lived the first 11 years of my life in a desert. This probably has something to do with my affection for heat. The optimum temperature for me is at least 80°F and "normal" attire, the dress that seems most natural to me, involves bare arms, bare legs and sandals. (I still find this normal; more clothes than that = hassle.) Contrastingly, others break into a sweat if the temperature approaches 70°F. Some people seem to find the very act of sweating an affront to their humanity, instead of a comforting reassurance of it. My step-father was known to shovel snow in his shorts. I do not think this makes him wrong. It just makes him him.
[End caveat]

So I return to Nicholas' and my trepidation. At least Massachusetts is not as cold as Montana and Wisconsin, we told ourselves. And with that, we traded in tropical storms and hurricanes for...more hurricanes, winter storms and, apparently, the occasional earthquake. (And people complain about Gulf Coasters living in hazard-prone areas. Ain't nowhere safe from Mother N., folks.)

Which brings me to the point of this post. I will have to hand Boston-area winters two things: sunshine (which it gets quite a bit of) and the surreal fun of blizzards.

Winter storm Nemo dropped over two feet of snow on Cambridge a few weeks ago and the city went quiet. Down our lane (above) and out our back window (below):

She* handled herself very well, her worker bees keeping streets passable, issuing a no-drive order so morons would not get themselves stuck and require emergency assistance better employed elsewhere.

And when the snow stopped falling, residents immediately hit the streets, snow shovels in hand. These folks who usually (a) will not make eye contact with each other, and (b) complain at the slightest inconvenience regarding, for instance, lateness in their otherwise wildly efficient public transit...these same folks were talking cheerily with each other and merrily exerting themselves shoveling hundreds of pounds of snow from their driveways, walkways, from around their cars, from around their neighbors' cars. Not only did Cambridge look weirdly beautiful buried in this dump of snow, but it really brought the best out in its residents. Our car, pre-shovel:

As timing would have it, Nemo hit the weekend before Mardi Gras. The evening after the storm, I made a pot of red beans and a king cake (below) and we held an impromptu carnival party for anybody intrepid enough to wade through the snow. New Orleans meets Cambridge.

While I will never love cold weather, and continue to dream of long hot summers, it's great to have found something about a New England winter that feels, well, warm.

*Is Cambridge a she? So far my sense of Cambridge would personify it more like a codgery, grumpy old guy who is very concerned that complete strangers are abiding by every rule and regulation in his Rule Book.