Lafayette Cemetery No. 1

Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 opened in 1833 in what is now the Garden District and takes its name from the City of Lafayette, a suburb New Orleans annexed in 1852. The World Monuments Fund calls it the city's first planned cemetery, with intersecting avenues laid out for funeral processions, and it served as a model for the more than thirty above-ground cemeteries built in the city in the nineteenth century. It holds about 1,100 family tombs with roughly 7,000 people, and it is still in use.

Its survival has been work. The World Monuments Fund put it on its Watch in 1996 because of deterioration, vandalism and unmanaged tourism, and again in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina damaged walls and tombs. Save Our Cemeteries and the Preservation Trades Network ran repair field schools here in 2006 and 2009. The city closed the cemetery to visitors in September 2019, citing vandalism, restoration needs and crowding from large tours.

It reopened on October 1, 2026, and the Preservation Resource Center is the only public tour provider. Groups are capped at 16, tours run 75 to 90 minutes and keep to documented history, and six sessions a day were reported at the opening. Guides pause or reroute when a family is at a tomb, and funerals come first. The restoration included an 1866 society tomb of 20 vaults, which will be used again for burials of people in need. Relatives of the buried arrange access through the city cemetery office.