Lafayette Cemetery No. 2

The cemetery reads as a map of New Orleans labor. The Butchers' Benevolent Society built an 87-vault tomb in 1868 for $5,000, collecting a dollar from every member at each death and fining those who skipped a burial; the society soon sued the city in the case that reached the Supreme Court in 1873 as the Slaughter-House Cases. Along the Sixth and Loyola Street fences stand brick-and-stucco tombs of Black benevolent societies of coachmen, teamsters, loaders and cotton yardmen, mostly built in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Only a few of the 22 society tombs are maintained.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 0.5 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 2.0 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 2.0 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 2.0 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• The New Zion Baptist Church — steps away
• Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) — 0.4 mi
• Ory Residence — 0.4 mi
• Mayor Isaac W. Patton House — 0.4 mi