Saving St. Louis No. 2 Cemetery from cars and longtime neglect | The Lens

For nine months, there’s been a sizable gap in the North Claiborne Avenue wall of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, left by a black SUV that swerved off the roadway in February and leveled a 20-foot section of brick and cinder-block

If the driver had veered a few yards to the left, it would have hit vaults of human remains. But by an ironic stroke of luck, the SUV plowed into a section of the wall that had been emptied 50 years ago.

Of the three-block span of cemetery facing Claiborne, the SUV crashed into the middle of Square 2, between Bienville and Conti Streets. Around 1974, the wall vaults there fell into “heavy disrepair” and collapsed, said Heather Veneziano, a preservationist who heads the consulting firm Gambrel & Peak. The wall was rebuilt without the interior vaults that still ring the rest of the cemetery, Veneziano said; and the bodies inside the collapsed span were subsequently buried near the base of the new wall.

Though mere chance limited the repercussions of the February accident, the incident served as a reminder that the brick walls around those three blocks — a backdrop for countless daily commuters — contain two centuries of New Orleans heritage that demands constant upkeep. That upkeep can include everything from damages from car crashes to a historic renovation project that’s reversing the long-term degradation of signature structures within the walls of St. Louis No. 2. 

In the months since the crash, Sherri Peppo, Executive Director of New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries, the nonprofit that manages St. Louis No. 2, has triaged emergency repairs while continuing to oversee the work of master craftsmen who are carefully preserving some of the burial ground’s most prominent tombs.

For Peppo, who has run NOCC for 11 years, the most dire emergencies are often centuries in the making, as New Orleans’ wet climate gradually breaks down the cemeteries’ structures, many formed from brick covered with plaster.

Even this summer, while wrangling an insurance settlement for the car-accident damage, Peppo had to move decisively to prevent the structural failure of a wall on Square 1 — she observed persistently thick “green growth coming between the joints” of part of the Claiborne-facing wall, between Conti and St. Louis Streets. She’d seen something similar — mortar deteriorating between bricks — before the partial collapse of a wall at nearby St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. So Peppo chose “to secure and stabilize” the structurally compromised wall in St. Louis No. 2 by coating it in lime plaster. 

The new off-white plaster surface obscured the red brick underneath, which has been a fixture in the living memory of downtown New Orleans, and familiar to others from images of jazz funerals. 

While Peppo acknowledged that “people like the visual look of the plain brick,” she believes that the new style could actually be a return to the cemetery’s original look. The walls may have started out plastered when the graveyard was consecrated in 1823, she said.

Restoring Big Benevolent-Society Tombs

As passersby on Claiborne adjusted to the freshly coated wall, a bigger transformation took shape in Square 3, out of public view.

Jeff Poree, 74, a fifth-generation master plasterer, has tackled nearly every obstacle possible within his field. But in Square 3 last fall, he faced a novel challenge: the restoration of a free-standing tomb, towering five vaults high by three wide, that was on the verge of collapse because a tree was growing within it.

Poree shakes his head now to even think of it. “The roots went all the way through the masonry, down into the ground, and it literally cracked apart,” he said.

Three years ago, Veneziano, the preservationist, first made notes about the tomb with the tree in it, as she completed an assessment of every tomb in St. Louis No. 2. The biggest risks to public safety in the cemetery came from its biggest structures: tombs built mostly in the mid- to late-19^th century by private organizations or societies that provided funeral and burial benefits to their members, she concluded. 

Most of these societies dissolved over the mid-twentieth century, as other forms of insurance became more widely accessible, leaving no one to fulfill the owner’s obligation to maintain the tombs. Many of the once-grand structures were in dire condition.

That’s when Veneziano forged the restoration project with NOCC. As she saw it, “You want to fix the big, obvious things first. And hopefully that leads individual family tomb owners to want to put in the investment to restore their own tombs.”

To pilot the project, Veneziano chose the tomb of the Société des Arts et Métiers, or Society of Arts and Crafts, which was the tallest in Square 3, even without counting the treetop that sprouted several feet over its roofline. 

Veneziano reached out to Poree through the New Orleans Master Crafts Guild, a non-profit he works with to train and support apprentices in architectural preservation. As other craftspeople and preservation specialists prepared to sign on, part of the back wall of the Arts et Métiers tomb failed, underscoring the urgency of the job. 

One Dilapidated Tomb Feels Familiar 

The mission to save the Society of Arts and Crafts tomb became personal for Poree after his wife, Carole DeLay, saw a photo of the pile of red bricks pried loose by the tree. They lay in a heap between the base of the society tomb and the back of an adjacent one, where, she noticed, the list of carved names included Poree’s mother’s surname, Lemoine.

“My grandmother’s parents are buried there, my grandmother’s brothers and sisters,” said Poree, who knew of the tomb through his family. His father, Calvin Poree, had replastered the family tomb for his mother, Jeff Poree’s grandmother, decades earlier. But Jeff Poree had long since lost track of its location.

Fixing the society tomb would have the added benefit of keeping his family’s tomb safe.

To do the job, Poree and his team — upwards of 16 people — uprooted the tree, which had busted through one of the tomb’s rear corners. “So we had to put braces all the way around [the tomb] and disassemble the back left-hand corner…get the tree out, then put it all back up and then replaster it,” Poree said.

The process took months. Then the team had to remove all the existing stucco, because it had been slapped onto the tomb in a long-ago repair attempt using modern-day cement. 

“You can’t use modern cements on this old way of building,” Poree explained. Besides being historically inaccurate, the way the cement adheres to the tombs’ soft brick can lead to structural problems. 

NOCC did not disinter any of the remains inside the tomb. Instead, Poree’s team made accommodations for the bodies. “When we’re working, we bear them in mind,” he said. “So if we open the wall up and you can see in … we give them their privacy back and put one course of brick up just to close it back up.”

Working in a 200-year-old cemetery also forced them to shelve their usual construction methods. “Everything is crooked,” Poree said. “You know, it’s leaning this way, leaning that way at the same time … So when you’re working on this stuff, you leave the level in your truck.” He and his team relied on a tape measure and repeated eyeballing from various distances to “make things look straight.”

Sawing Out Trees, Removing Stucco

Through the heat of summer, Poree’s team restored two other tombs in Square 3, including one built by the Société de Bienfaisance, from which all but the lower trunk of a palm tree was excised by chainsaw, and another, the largest structure in St. Louis No. 2, built by the Christian Doctrine Society. 

One of the few archival traces of the Christian Doctrine Society suggests that the group took particular care in assuring the dignity of burial. 

Upon the 1874 death of a 34-year-old French-born clergyman who’d ministered to Black New Orleanians, The New Orleans Republican described the society “taking charge of [his] remains and acting as chief mourners and pall bearers,” then having him “entombed in section No. 3 of the St. Louis Cemetery.”

The white clergyman’s interment is notable because at the time Square 3 was officially designated for people of color. It has since become nationally known for who has been laid to rest there. As historians Raphael Cassimere, D. Clive Hardy, and Joseph Logsdon have written, the square “probably contains the largest number of monuments in one place to note the achievements and struggles of Black Americans in the nineteenth century.”

The societies that built tombs here were integral to those struggles and achievements. Most famously, the dances and funerals with music sponsored by benevolent societies helped give rise to jazz. Beyond that, the organizations provided mutual aid and social cohesion in a community contending with the rise of Jim Crow. 

Now the restored tombs can stand as a testament to their work. 

At the Société des Arts et Métiers tomb, the restoration team crowned the tomb’s roof with refurbished Greek revival details. As Poree described the finishing touches: “When we got all of the fancy moldings back up, we manufactured 15 simulated marble headstones,” he said. 

Once everything was complete, the team painted the headstones with two coats of lime wash, leaving them “a sparkling, brilliant white,” Poree said.

St. Louis No. 2: Improved, but a long way to go 

When Poree was a young man in the 1970s, sometimes the only job he could find was plastering tombs in St. Louis No. 2. The cemetery was in rough shape back then, he said: “You could actually walk by and look in a lot of the tombs, and just see the bones.” 

NOCC’s disregard for maintenance reached a nadir in that era, when the State Health Department declared St. Louis No. 2 a health hazard. Rather than attempt to mitigate it, NOCC (then called Archdiocesan Cemeteries) ordered its demolition. Public opposition scuttled that plan, and birthed the advocacy organization Save Our Cemeteries.

NOCC is incorporated separately from the Archdiocese of New Orleans; its funding today comes almost entirely from tours of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 on Basin Street.

These days, St. Louis No. 2 has improved vastly from the place Poree grew up seeing, he said. “It’s much nicer. It’s got a long way to go, but it is.”

Still, repair money from the tours of St. Louis No. 1 must be stretched across multiple Catholic cemeteries in the city. While NOCC has embraced the call for historic preservation, it operates with revenue far below the cost of repairing and maintaining the perpetually increasing number of abandoned tombs on its grounds. 

Despite improvements, conditions  at St. Louis No. 2 remain precarious. In 2021, NOCC closed its gates to the general public in part because of the potential liability of masonry falling from unstable structures. Since then, family members of the interred are able to visit by appointment only.

There is no timetable for reopening the gates. But Peppo says that NOCC will restore more society tombs in the future with a goal of making the grounds safe. 

‘Part of your life, seeing your ancestors’

In the meantime, with the insurance settlement from February’s car accident resolved, Peppo expects the downed brick and cinder block to be replaced soon by a new metal fence, leaving a piece of the brick wall missing but providing an intact perimeter to protect the cemetery. A month ago, on All Saints Day, November 1^st, the gates of St. Louis No. 2 were open to allow visitors to see the restoration project’s progress on the society tombs.

When Poree visits Square 3 these days, it’s like a reunion. “I can’t even count the people we know. Tootie Montana’s out here,” Poree said, referring to the legendary Black Masking Indian Big Chief, a fellow master craftsman from the Seventh Ward who worked as a lather. 

Poree plans to be laid to rest here himself, next to the now-immaculate Society of Arts and Crafts tomb, just “up the street” from his wife’s family tomb on the same row in Square 3. But, he says, “I don’t have any plans yet to go home. I got stuff to do.”

All Saints’ Day has always been significant for Poree: “It’s a tradition, when you’re Creole, to go and refurbish your people’s tomb, bring them new flowers for November the First. Everyone goes,” he said.

When he was a child, his father made it a weeklong event. He “had so many tombs to repair or whitewash that we would start going after work in the evenings, and then work the weekend,” Poree recalled. 

“It’s part of your life, seeing your ancestors,” he said.

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