Rest In Pieces - The floodwater has receded, but Katrina's mark on local cemeteries remains
Submitted By: 		N.O.V.A March 2006
Source:			Times Picayune 03-01-2006

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The view from Interstate 10 at Metairie Road on Monday afternoon,
Aug. 29, 2005, was numbing. The carefully mowed lawn surrounding
the neoclassical tombs in Metairie Cemetery had been replaced by a
sea of brown water. The same water gushed into nearby Greenwood
Cemetery through a large concrete conduit beneath the railroad
tracks, the waterline slowly rising on the tombs and headstones.

For more than a century and a half, New Orleans' peculiar above-
ground cemeteries have been a silent, white-on-white echo of life
in the noisy, colorful Crescent City. The social order,
architecture and, of course, the occupants of the city's
neighborhoods and its cemeteries are the same.

Across New Orleans, burial grounds were scoured by Hurricane
Katrina and soaked by the subsequent flood. In Greenwood and
elsewhere, the blasting wind snapped thin marble headstones, which
sometimes dominoed into one another. The termite-weakened roof of
a social aid and pleasure club's shared tomb in St. Louis Cemetery
No. 2 disintegrated in the storm. The stained-glass window of an
elaborate crypt in Metairie Cemetery was wrenched loose and
shattered, blue shards falling around the carving of a mourning
angel. As in most places, telltale brown tide marks recorded the
passing of the floodwater in St. Roch Cemetery. And after the
storm, weeds grew to enormous proportion in Holt Cemetery,
blotting out some of the city's humblest plots.

Though most of the city's graves and tombs remained intact, in the
wake of Katrina the already forlorn cities of the dead seemed
especially dour. Weeks after the storm had passed and the
floodwater receded, photographer and historian John McCusker
returned to the cemeteries he knows so well, where he captured the
images on these pages.