New Orleans Cemeteries | A Virtual Metairie Cemetery Walking Tour

hey y'all it's andrew with free tours by foot new orleans today's adventure is new orleans cemeteries right now i'm surrounded by not one or two but 14 of them there's a part of the city that we stand called the city of the dead where a lot of them are clustered together so we're gonna explore one of those cemeteries in particular this is a thing that people sometimes do when they travel to new orleans more often than in most other cities some people think it's cool some people think it's creepy let us know in the comments which of those camps you fall into as at the start of this video and also down there if you've got any questions for us anything that comes to your mind while you're watching please feel free to ask and we'll get you an answer also being a pay what you will tour company got a button at the top for where to throw us tips if you got the inspiration please feel free to hit that button we're going to get started first going to check out some normal tombs and then afterwards we'll head to metairie cemetery which is where the wealthiest of new orleans tend to be buried you'll see a pretty big difference let's get started so this is a pretty middle of the road classic traditional new orleans tomb y'all and the process that we do is kind of a two-phase burial so what you can see right in front of you is phase one so you can see there's multiple names on here of people who have been buried in this tomb and when a new person passes away you'd remove this plaque and there's a space behind for placing the body once someone's in there the heat of new orleans combined with the materials of the tomb causes it to get super hot inside and biodegradation happens really fast so that by the time you need to use the tomb again hopefully at least a year later and a lot of tombs have multiple vaults to ease this up a little bit you can remove the first person from the vault and put them through phase two of their burial which is to take the bones that are left over bag them up and drop them into an underground compartment lies usually underneath this so in that second phase a person is a lot smaller you can fit dozens of people inside of even just a small tomb like this for that reason and so when you multiply that times the hundreds of tombs that are in any given one of these cemeteries times 14 cemeteries you can imagine the dead way way outnumber the living in this part of the city but for us being a really small town surrounded by water it's a really logical efficient system to go with and it's by and large still how at least a pretty large percentage of new orleanians are buried formerly the majority but still kind of a large number so this is not what we're going to see in metairie cemetery the bare essential idea is the same but the outside is going to be a completely different story we're going to find that actually right on the other side of a highway out here so when all this was built originally cemeteries tended to be put out at the edge of a city because the idea was the dead might be able to spread the diseases that had been involved in killing them and so you wanted to have some distance between the living and the dead the city's expanded a lot since then so what used to be a quiet sort of park-like suburban atmosphere now is right by an interstate highway so we're going to be passing under that and we'll rejoin you after that worth noting too though if you ever decide you want to visit this part of the city while you're in town you would be able to arrive right where i am now via streetcar so this is canal street and canal street at its other end runs right along the edge of the french quarter most of the hotels in and around the french quarter are going to be really close to canal street so you could walk over to canal street find a streetcar that says cemeteries across the front so you cannot miss it and you would land right where i am now it would just be a short walk around the corner and underneath the highway in order to get to metairie cemetery we'll see you [Music] there [Music] we just stepped inside metairie cemetery y'all and we are next to not just the tallest monument in this cemetery but the tallest privately owned monument in the united states so everything i said about efficiency at our last stop forget all of it everything here is about size and excess a special section of the railroad track had to be built to get this thing in here so between all of them the message of these tombs they all tell their own story but collectively the story they tell is yes i can take it with me people spend insane amounts of money on these things and wealth is consistently the case across the board here but there's a little bit of a divide in terms of old money versus new money and where we are right now you're actually seeing one of the new money situations so the moriarty family here joseph is a father we also have his son daniel on the other side who was an immigrant from ireland he and his wife mary immigrated here separately married in new orleans and coming from where they came from irish immigrants if you just took the work that was available to you here you tended to find yourself digging a canal through mosquito-infested swamps and you were likely to die of yellow fever within weeks of arriving in new orleans so you had to be really lucky to find your way where he did and he ends up becoming a sugar broker arrives without the money to pay for probably even one of the rose bushes that surround this thing today and he and his wife go into real estate speculation eventually and they make the money never to get into new orleans society new orleans is a city that at any point in its history has had a uh a birth-based elite but they do make the money to where he can build her a monument when she passes away before him from which she can literally look down on all of the better born higher born people in the city so this is one of the cases of not necessarily a household name in new orleans but somebody who really worked hard to become one we have another similar situation with a monument just around the way so big renaissance style monument over here this was to a guy named eugene lacoste he's a french immigrant and when he arrives in new orleans he's working as a hairdresser but he does what you do in that profession he gets to know people manages to make some friends in high places and reveals to them his real talent which is whistling this man managed through his connections and his skill to get top billing at the french opera house which is where european operas debuted in the united states just for whistling and eventually between his performance skills his connections a little bit of money from hairdressing he became a stock player basically and made enough money doing that that he could build this for himself and his mother and the whole internment portion over there is just one solid piece of marble this guy had this built during world war one when materials and labor were in short supply it took sixty thousand dollars in world war one era money to do this and the sarcophagus piece of it is one single piece of marble crafted on site the the row of names along this where you get gold ring jacob's coal a lot of a lot of nationalities in one place [Music] and as underdogs among these overdogs go this is the ultimate one even if we lived in a city where where you came from didn't matter there would still be certain professions that would lock you out of polite society and the person originally buried here was a madam in storyville which was our red light district in the early 20th century josie arlington was very successful in her business enough to make the money to build this and when she decided to have a tomb built in metairie cemetery you can imagine the collective gasp and the design of it with the statue here of a young woman touching a door has been the source of all kinds of imagination in terms of what she was thinking lots of these tombs tell stories without us really understanding what they are but this one in particular people interpret it as either her turning virgins away who came wanting to work for her of her being turned away from or trying to return to her own family her life isn't understood as well enough for us to be able to explain it we do know for sure though is after she was buried here because of the uproar it caused her body was removed by the cemetery to an unknown location and with that nearly impossible little turn that you have to do apparently they actually used to have a stop light there and there was a red light that would like illuminate this oh wow yeah so long since gone cause apparently drew the wrong kind of attention but i've actually gotten to talk with the guy morales who owns this today this family came into possession of it when the estate sold it after her death but they are open to the idea of burying her back inside they just don't know where she is to be able to do it [Music] for somebody who lives in new orleans walking through this cemetery is kind of like walking through a microcosm of the city at large there's tons of names that you recognize right here we've got grunewald and monteleone side by side these were the founders and the namesakes of two of the biggest most famous hotels in the city the grindelwald is now called the roosevelt so they're right on either side of canal street flanking the edge of the french quarter but also exploring this place you run into a lot of things that are less historic more just to do with pieces of day-to-day life people who were the founders of grocery stores you can see one and say kizzy it's like the ham so for people from new orleans this is a strangely delightful place because you get to be reminded of all of these things that are just pieces of culture from every phase of new orleans history things that are a part of almost everybody's life whether they know or not that is the last name of somebody who was buried here [Music] who doesn't know was the stang sarpy his wife pauline forshay and the ambiguously related emilius [Music] haydel [Music] as you can see from these these tombs are made in all kinds of materials you got them in marble granite stained glass cast iron and you also get them in all kinds of styles depending on what people's references are and where they came from the egan family here had this tomb built as an exact miniature match of a ruined abbey that was on the grounds of their home back in ireland down to matching where the cracks were on everything [Music] [Music] [Music] and this tomb which moorish revival with a byzantine cross on top this was commissioned by none other than pgt beauregard the confederate general and how he came to have these references in his life is not known but he chose them for someone very important his daughter whose remains are buried here along with her husband and their family [Music] before the cemetery was developed as such shortly after the civil war it had originally been a race track and you can still see the shape of the racetrack from the curve that all the paths go in they're wide enough too to be drive so most people visiting here it makes more sense to drive through the cemetery than to actually walk through it because of how large it is this also the central area that we're in right now is some of the earliest stuff that was sold late in the 19th century a lot of this is referred to as millionaires row and it's some of the biggest most over-the-top designs most of what you're going to see out here is classical designs sort of greco-roman but now and then imagine you're a fan of egyptian revival architecture can't choose between a pyramid and a sphinx why not both so lucian brunswig and his family did something that was not totally out of the ordinary at the time there was a big vogue for egyptian stuff around the time that a lot of the archaeology in egypt was uncovering how pyramids and so on worked but it was uh definitely a nod to the status that he had achieved here to bury himself like an ancient egyptian pharaoh this guy started a pharmaceutical company that's still around today [Music] we have a couple of large tombs in the cemetery devoted to divisions of the military specifically the confederate military this is a tumulus tombs in a hill dedicated to the army of northern virginia and jefferson davis the one president of the confederacy was originally buried here you can see his signature on the vault that he once occupied and he was eventually removed and taken away to virginia this is the city where he died and even before civil war era burials were dedicated here the cemetery was created immediately following the civil war the business of race tracks and other luxuries like that wasn't running well in the post-civil war era and so the property changed hands became a cemetery and some of the first dedications were to the military dead we also have the louisiana division of the army of [Music] tennessee [Music] [Music] members of the military also weren't the only people who got buried as groups a lot of times group pooling of resources was the only way somebody could afford maybe a tomb at all but especially a tomb in a high cost area like this so you get society tombs in this case societies of italian immigrants banding together around the shared place they were from shared profession shared language and just shared burdens possibly society tombs were also founded by people who shared a profession and sometimes people who went to the same church so many people who were working to middle class and especially out here in the suburbs folks who were aspirational from wherever they started when they arrived towards a higher level previously the city itself especially the french quarter super italian but now that's mostly suburbs around where we are now where they live so you get these large communal monuments and then once in a while you'll see plenty of italian names out here of folks who made enough to also have their very own tombs and one of them is louis prima this is one of our more famous jazz musicians depending on your uh your generation possibly either know him for his own stuff we have some of the lyrics of his song just to gigolo on the tomb itself a little bit of a lighthearted exit but also for people of my generation maybe best known as king louie from the animated movie of the jungle book so he is remembered by a trumpet-blowing angel on top that was his instrument besides his voice so fewer musicians made their way out to a place like this but he was one who did well enough to pull it off [Music] one [Music] foreign [Music] if you haven't heard of the new orleans that i've mentioned previously this is somebody you're likely to be familiar with anne rice our vampire novelist built this tomb for her husband stan also a writer in his case a poet so a few of his poems are inscribed on the side he passed away while they still lived here she doesn't live here anymore but she has this ready and waiting for her when her day comes [Music] [Music] thanks for watching hope you enjoyed the tour if you're going to visit new orleans definitely drop us your ideas and your questions we'll be happy to help you out with making your itinerary and if you know anybody who's going to be coming here soon let them know about this video and the rest of ours we've got a whole series of them about new orleans and lots of other cities so hopefully we can help you find your way wherever you're going to be visiting soon and if you liked what you saw of course hit the button down below subscribe hit the bell so that you get your notifications and let us know what you thought hit the tip button at the top if you'd like to throw us something thanks for your time

Channel: Free Tours by Foot

Views: 25,312

Rating: 4.9513812 out of 5

Keywords: metairie cemetery, metairie cemetery virtual tour, metairie cemetery tour, new orleans virtual tour, metairie new orleans, who is buried in metairie cemetery, tours of metairie cemetery, new orleans cemeteries, new orleans cemetery tour, new orleans cemetery virtual tour, tours of new orleans cemetery, new orleans cemetery, cities of the dead, metairie cemetery map, video for treadmill, video for treadmill walking, cemetery, nola deej, holt cemetery new orleans, go nola

Id: GbuAJV-_LmU

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020