Lafayette Cemetery: Happier Then You'd Think

It's finals time here at Tulane, and due to a rift in the space time continum...I don't have any. This has faced me with the terrifying prospect of a few days with nothing much to do at all. This might be considered a good thing to most normal, sane people, but you see, I happen to be a bona-fide nut job, the sort of person who gets all squirrely when I can't be off Achieving Crap. No, this week, I'm being forced to wander the streets of New Orleans, take naps, and visit places in town I've never had the time to experience before. You should really be weeping for me right now. Hey, I don't see tears -what is this?

Anywho.

I was walking up Washington Avenue recently and realized as I passed that the gate to Lafayette Cemetary was open. The gate to Lafayette Cemetery is never open, and I made a right-turn and walked right in. It may have been a hot mid-afternoon, but I wanted to commune with the spirit of dead New Orleanians, or at least take some pictures.

Lafayette Cemetery is one old graveyard - it was started in 1833, before the Garden District was even incorporated into the city proper. Once the city of Lafayette was incorporated into New Orleans proper, the little block of land become the city's first incorporated cemetery. It gained its biggest influx of residents in 1841, when New Orleans found itself in the grip of a terrible yellow fever epidemic. 241 burials were performed in Lafayette in 1841, and more then 613 by a second 1847 outbreak. The cemetery didn't get much love in the ensuing years and almost fell into disrepair, ignomy, and hard drugs - but as so often happens in this city, a dedicated bunch of local history buffs got together to fix it up and save it. Lafayette Cemetery is now a super-popular tourist destination, prowled by groups of sunburnt n' sweaty tourists at all times of day (which is their right, god bless em', et all). It is also smack dab across the street from Commanders Palace if viewing all of those crypts gets you a little bit hungry. (Secret: I'm going this Saturday! Secret: Yeehaw!)

So here's what I saw.



open crypt!

What's this?


spooky!

My god, the zombified corpse of Pere Jacques the Fifteenth is out and about and stalking the city, riding the streetcar, drinking beer out of brown paper bags and god knows what else. Swear I've seen this guy on Bourbon Street. He tried to buy me a Jager and I tittered and said I like em' living and he looked real sad. I feel like I was a little ugly to him.


Rows in the cemetery

The cemetery is laid out rather like the French cemeteries of yore: above ground crypts create the feeling of a "city of the dead." This cemetery is reputed to be Extremely Haunted like pretty much everything else in New Orleans. (There are probably Haunted Public Restrooms in New Orleans). Certainly it's probably more then a little bit spooky here at night.


Good view of white crypts

But during the day, it's a pleasant place to walk around, read the inscriptions, and get out of the heat: plenty of tall trees and sheltering palms and cool granite slabs to rest on. When I was a young and stupid freshman (uh two years ago,) we would on occasion go and drink soda pop in the Great Barrington cemetery. That was fun and all, but the Lafeyette cemetery would be infinitely better. Unfortunately they lock it all up after noon every day, so no opportunities for late-nite naughtiness exist. This also saves the general public from having ghosts eat their souls so I applaud the decision.



Gun carriage

Many of the people in Lafayette died during the Civil War. I believe this is a gun carriage. I wasn't there so I wouldn't know for sure.


Rows from Dupuy crypt


Dupuy crypt

My grandfather's family is French Creole from New Orleans, going way way back. I was walking through the cemetery and thought to myself, "I wonder if any Dupuy's are buried here?" And I rounded a corner and wouldn't you kno w it, there was the Dupuy crypt in living color. I don't know who these people are and I don't know if we're even related, but it did make me sit and contemplate a bit. Someone's keeping those flowers up. I considered hanging around, waiting for the family to come back, and asking them if we were related but then realized that would be eccentric. So I sat underneath the palm next door and contemplated temporality for a bit. Gave me a headache.



Times were hard back in New Orleans early history, and this grave illustrates why: way too many people passing way too close to one another.


Like the way this grave looked.


Overgrown with plants and whatnot. I think it's atmospheric. Other think so too: apparently the grass was being grown out for a movie being shot on the premises.


Connected forever, et all, by symbols of only-in-New-Orleans DECADENCE AND SIN.


This crypt is elderly and is cracking a bit. It's probably due to the vengeful and angry voodoo queen spirit encased within. Or a natural byproduct of erosion, whatever floats your boat.


This girl died when she was 21 years old, probably of the yellow fever. I am not fond of looking at the graves of people roughly my age. Makes me bilious. And/or filled with existential fear.


This obelisk immortalizes a young man who died in the Civil War, and, according to the plaque, "without fear." I liked this.


One of the many angels and evocative statues the cemetery contains. It's a shame how bland and boring most modern cemeteries are - I think unique sculptures and the ornate detailing on many of these graves is very life affirming and pleasant. It strikes me as a better way to while away the hours in eternity.


Finally, there was this cool little grotto - a nice place to duck under and get out of the heat.

Hopefully I'll make it out to some of the city's other historical cemeteries soon, but this was a really pleasant little distraction from a sticky Uptown day. Come and visit.

Primeval Train Menus

Menus From Primeval Trains

I love old menus. People back in the day ate many curious things: potted meat, lettuce-bowls, salads composed of Miracle Whip and canned fruit, things preservered in aspic, and on and on and on.

These particular old menus come from the Sacramento History website. They are from the old train lines that used to go up and down California, all the way to Chicago and New York City if you really felt like it. Since there was no such thing as first class air, the rich traveled in style in luxury dining and sleeping cars, watching the prairie roll by as they enjoyed oysters and, well, stuff in aspic.

You can still get food on California trains but it consists of microwave heated faux hamburgers and granola bars. We are falling, we are falling, we have fallen.



Click the button for the whole menu.

Mmm, cold ox tongue with potato salad. I can sort of imagine that that was a culinary delicacy back in the dark ages, the sort of thing one yearned for when feeling depressed, but I don't entirely buy it. I see parents threatening their acting up children on long train trips: "You keep on squealing like that and all you're going to eat til' we get to Chicago is COLD OX TONGUE WITH POTATO SALAD. YOU WILL GET NOTHING ELSE."

I bet they shut up immediately.


Click the button.

Guests will Please not Serve Verbal Orders? I wonder how THAT policy came about. Did a lot of men with curly mustaches and really ugly canes bark, "GET THEE OVER HERE THWAITE FOR I AM DESIRING SOME ASPARAGUS ON TOAST WITH DRAWN BUTTER?" Did these self-same waiters, in their stupid outfits with spats on them, honest to God spats - did one of them finally snap one day and shove the fine gentleman out on the prairie to consort with buffalo? I really wish I knew the whole story.



HOLY CRAP.

No one should be allowed to like lettuce that much, absolutely no one no way no how. I think they criminalized that kind of lettuce love in at least five or ten of the Southern states. Now I understand why.



And what were these lettuce whores eating? Looks like a pretty tasty spread to me, though I really really wonder how the heck they kept those oysters nice and fresh on a long train journey. This menu actually wouldn't be out of place at some keep-it-simple-stupid type restaurants that are out there today. Although insofar as I know no one serves grilled lamb chops on TOAST anymore, but that sound eminently palatable and it should be brought back immediately.

What is a cottage fried potato? Anyone?



And now we come to dinner time. Broiled jumbo squab with fried wild rice and guava jelly? I think I've seen that actual dish on the menu of about twelve hoity-toity San Francisco epicurean palaces. Everything Old is New Again?

Note the LETTUCE BOWL. The lettuce man would like you to order the LETTUCE BOWL. Otherwise he will creep into your sleeping car and draw aside the curtain and grin at you while you sleep, and your dreams will turn dark and dismal.

Just so you know.



Happy Meals of ye olden days? Better believe it. Those children we spy sitting at the table do not look so happy themselves, but at least they aren't eating cold beef tongue with potato salad. Perk up, whelps.



I love the super retro art on the side. I suspect this must be from the 40's and 50's, when every red blooded American child wanted to be a cowboy - fighting off Indians, battling desperadoes, contracting syphilis from the Hangtown hooker with the lazy eye, you know the score.



Nothing to snark on here, really. The food looks simple, fresh, and tasty - a real step up from the microwaved, mushy, watery junk you get on the road today. Of course, we complain about food en route constantly, but the reason it got so bad was a simple matter of numbers: more people now have the means to travel around the country, and travel isn't the luxury it used to be. The easy solution to this is for everyone to stay home but me.



The Feather River Route still runs today, connecting Oakland and Salt Lake City. Begun in 1906 and completed in 1909, the route traverses the Sierra Nevada and the deserts of Nevada and Utah. It is apparently incredibly scenic, but passenger trains don't use the FRR anymore - the only way for a mere mortal to experience it is to hop a freight train like a hobo. Can't do it in style like you used to be able to.



Budweiser, Aspirin, and imported cigars. Yeah, they got you covered if your old lady keeps on bitchin' about how irritating your twenty five dozen cousins and relations in Utah are and how she totally swears your second cousin Vinnie is carryin' on a plural marriage with those women from the canyon, and you just can't listen to another word of it, another word or you will just yak up your beef tongue. Yes, the management understood you, Sir, they really did.



I bet it was very pleasant to eat a nice breakfast like this with the sun coming up over the Sierra Nevada. A pleasure denied us today, tragically, but we can read the menu and pretend. The only objectonal things here: jelly omlet (eggs and fruit, by jove, no) and the mysterious item that is the Kaffee Hag. I would like to believe that the Kaffe Hag is actually an ancient and pustulent German woman who shuffles around the train muttering obscenities to herself while pouring the morning Joe, but I doubt that was actually the case. But would have been funny.

All for now. I think I will find more of these because they are amusing. I long for the past sometimes, and I wonder how the food tasted.

Awesome Old Photos From Sacramento's Checkered Past!

Here's some neat old food photos from the Sacramento History website.

Trolling through the Sacramento History website, I was most chuffed to discover these wonderful artifacts from Ancient California. Sacramento was a real railway hub back in the days of yore - its other claim to fame beyond the whole "state capital" thing - and interesting paraphenila from those bygone glory days abounds. Apparantly that Golden Spike thing was the 1800's equivalant of a Britney Spears revival concert: this stuff was big. As a railway hub, Sacramento saw a fair share of Northern California's produce and goods circulate through its warehouses and packaging companies - most of the stuff below hails from these forgotten raisin n' almond shillers. Ah, for more innocent times. Well, beside the early death and polio crap, I can do without that.

Some gems:
Hustler Brand Bartletts



Young Larry Flynt hated his job shilling Bartlett Pears for the packaging company: out by the street corner at all hours, getting paid next to nothing as he hollered and yelled at the people frequenting J Street's many charming and hip saloons and flophouses. But little Larry did very much enjoy watching the bustles and bosums of the women going by, jiggling alluringly under their coverings of lace and calico. Hmm, I can do something with that, the boy thought one day...



I would require a pyschology degree before I could interpret what exactly is going on here. Does the pig represent good ol' William Randolph Hearst, king of the Gilded Age douchebags? Is the pig a veiled, winking reference to the common sight of patriotic and corpulent homosexuals on San Francisco's early street? What the hell was a dude back then anyway - was it a subtle reference to something naughty and fascinating? (This was rather healthily prior to The Simpsons, ancient as that show may be.)

I do know this: if I found a teeny tiny little monocle and top hat in a grocery store package of pork, I would probably cry for days.



Mr Bondi: shiller of fine fruits, vegetables, and unnerving, sexually deviant stares. The neighborhood women never let their little boys buy Bartlett pears from Funny Old Mr. Bondi.



The joke makes itself.



"Mother, how have things changed since you were a little girl?"

"Goodness, what a question! We didn't have any cars, or McDonalds, or television sets. And my mother didn't have a torso, that's one thing. She'd just sort of float around everywhere, her and her shoulders and her disembodied hands, just drift around on the wind. Sometimes we'd run races for her and she'd just sit there and cry. All these tears would just run down her poor old cheeks. And we could just tell she wanted to have legs and she could just never have em'. "

"Grandmother's creepy, Mom."

"Well, yes."



The homo-erotic Olympics continue. Here, Senor Man Titties appears to be rending a waterfall from rock with the sheer manly manliness of his big man hands. I imagine there is also some serious grunting going on up in here. The fetching loin-cloth is still worn on ceremonial occasions in Northern California: guess things haven't changed since Mother Was A Girl.



Yes, folks, this is J Street, Sacramento's favorite Avenue of the Tragically Hip (or just unwashed.) I imagine back in the day dandies with convincingly rustic canes promenaded up and down the street, stopping in occasionally for a spot of small producer absinthe and a down-market chic Hang-town Fry, containing only sustainable and cruelty free ingredient. Perhaps they'd all hang out at the bar when it got late and make derogatory comments about the losers who liked to listen to ragtime. What DID Gilded Age hipsters do all day, anyway?



The ice cream girl's expression is clear: "If you do not buy some delicious ice cream from me, I shall kick you in the gonads."

You had better buy some ice cream.



They used to have TRAIN CRASHES at the State Fair. REAL LIVE TRAIN CRASHES. Now we just have the World's Biggest Cow and sweaty people. This is so heinously unfair. I have spent my entire life being deprived of witnessing a REAL ACTUAL TRAIN CRASH while eating meat on a stick and I blame YOU, America.

Coming soon: old menus from the California railroad! See what weird junk people ate back then! Marvel at how they managed to stay skinny despite surviving on butter and bacon!

Happy Burns Night

Burns night is today, that annual celebration of Scotland's premier poet. An excuse to listen to bagpipe music, drink Scotch, and eat bizarre Scottish foods, it's an (obviously) unmissable holiday. To pay homage to the great man without actually having to eat any sheep stomach, have some thematic links.

The Haggis Challenge

An intrepid British Guardian writer attempts to make a haggish with, well...expected...results. The photos are particularly charming.

American haggis supplier!

New Jersey's Stewart's Scottish Market has haggis, black pudding, and other UK delights for your perusal. Order five, give them to your friends!

Address to a Haggis

Here's the man himself's opinions on the majesty and wonder of haggis. I feel ya bro, I feel ya.

A step by step video guide to a Burns Supper.

Watch carefully and hold your own! Be sure to hire a good bagpiper. It may help if you live somewhere very far away from neighbors.

And finally, an exceedingly awesome joke, ganked from TwelfthOfNever's journal.

"Tony Blair is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one.

The patient replies:
"Fair fa your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin race,
Aboon them a you take your place,
Painch, tripe or thairm,
As langs my airm."

Blair is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient.
The patient responds:
"Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit."

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the PM moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:
"We sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty,
Thou needna start awa sae hastie,
Wi bickering brattle."

Now seriously troubled, Blair turns to the accompanying doctor and asks "What kind of facility is this? A mental ward?"
"No", replies the doctor.
"This is the serious Burns unit."