New Orleans's Mid-City offers something for every type of traveler: restaurants, shops, and walking tours, and all of it within a great, laid back residential section of the city. Yet, the most important part of Mid-City that rivals the rest of New Orleans is its cemeteries, most notably Metairie Cemetery, Cypress Grove, and Odd Fellows Rest.
Throughout the cemeteries, visitors can find the plots of voodoo practitioners, politicians, and pirates. These places are an historical tour de force and a tour for the imagination. In addition to the caliber of people found, visitors oftentimes find flowers, votive candles, and hoodoo money in honor of the dead.
Metairie Cemetery, founded in 1872, was built on the Metairie Race Course. It originally housed victims of yellow fever who could not be buried within the city proper. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was originally interred there. Other noteworthy plots are the Italian Society Tomb and the Brunswig Tomb.
To visit New Orleans's cemeteries is to learn a whole new language. Most vaults or plots are infused with funerary symbolism. For example, an anchor stands for hope; the broken column represents life cut short; and the broken flower symbolizes a life terminated. The clasped hands that can be found almost everywhere stands for unity and love, even after death. Flowers in these cemeteries also represent a variety of human emotions: the pansy with remembrance and humility; the poppy with sleep; the red rose with martyrdom; the white rose and the lily with purity; and the daisy with innocence.
In addition to the symbols, the architecture and types of tombs of the cemeteries vary greatly within their own gates. Among different types of tombs, visitors to any of the 42 cemeteries in the city and most particularly to the ones in Mid-City can find the following: barrel-vaulted, pitched roof, pyramid, sarcophagus, society, stepped, temples, and wall vaults.
After a day spent visiting the cemeteries section of New Orleans, many restaurants of various ethnicities (Italian, Vietnamese, Jamaican, and African, among others) and shops can be found along Carrollton Avenue and Canal Street.
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