St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

The ground here won't take a grave. The water table sits too high — dig six feet and you hit the swamp that made this port city possible. So when New Orleans opened this cemetery in 1789, replacing St. Peter Cemetery after the 1788 fire redesigned the city, builders stacked the dead above ground in whitewashed vaults. The result: row after row of crumbling plaster tombs packed into a single city block, eight blocks from the Mississippi, just beyond the French Quarter's inland border. The landscape earned the nickname "Cities of the Dead." The roster reads like a ledger of the city's formative centuries. Etienne de Boré, sugar industry pioneer and New Orleans' first mayor. Homer Plessy, whose name anchors the 1896 Supreme Court case that formalized segregation. Paul Morphy, early world chess champion. Bernard de Marigny, the French-Creole aristocrat who founded Faubourg Marigny. Delphine LaLaurie, the slave owner whose cruelty became legend. Benjamin Latrobe, the architect who died of yellow fever in 1820 while engineering the city's waterworks. Marie Laveau draws the most attention. The Voodoo priestess is believed to rest in the Glapion family crypt, and visitors still leave offerings at what they think is her tomb. In 2010, Nicolas Cage bought a pyramid-shaped vault for his own future use. The cemetery has been in continuous use since 1789. A Protestant section, generally not vaulted, occupies the northwest corner. The tombs are crumbling; preservation work continues. Since March 2015, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese — which owns and manages the cemetery — has required visitors to come with a tour guide, citing vandalism. Tour companies pay $4,500 annually for access. Families with tomb ownership can apply for passes.