Brain Candy #78 - The City of New Orleans

There were a few minor mysteries I desired to clear up once we got back. Catherine is direct, and will walk up to just about anyone to ask a question. I'll usually note what I'm curious about, and then find a web browser later and try to research the question. I'm often surprised at how much I find out, and also sometimes how much I can't. There's also the collateral information that comes for free - material that is not what I was looking for, but is interesting, nonetheless.

We acted like typical tourists on this trip, nothing too fancy, other than doing some serious restaurant research in advance. One of the touristy things we did was take some of the many walking tours available. These are sometimes less informative than they are entertaining, but the best ones succeed from both perspectives. For instance, we took one of the graveyard tours and happened to be the only two people our guide had. I suspect that he turned off most of his showman persona under the circumstances, but it then became a personal tour by a guide who actually knew quite a bit about the subject.

We walked to Saint Louis Cemetery #1, just outside the French Quarter. This isn't recommended for small groups, as the cemeteries of New Orleans are considered unsafe territory, but our guide was beefy, and was wearing one of those big leather coats that might hide any kind of man-portable weapon under the sun - not the kind of person who would encourage a random mugger. He also was watching carefully, and thus we were relatively safe.

Burial places in New Orleans are almost exclusively above ground - the water table in the city is too high to allow practical burials underground. It was also traditional to lavish much attention and expense on these burial sites. Many are, however, very old, so a trip to one of these resembles a trip to ancient ruins. Many famous people are buried in Saint Louis #1, including Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen. I didn't take a picture of her tomb, but one of the vaults had a very compelling statue of a young girl that I did take a picture of. It came out very well, perhaps the best photo I've taken lately. The guide said that in rainy weather, the rain trickles down the statue so that the girl appears to be crying. At the time, I didn't think much about it, but when I saw how good the photo had turned out to be, I wanted to know more about the statue.

A traditional Google search didn't turn up anything quickly, so I started looking for information on the cemetery itself. I found a web site, cml.upenn.edu/nola/ , that had an actual clickable map of the tomb sites in the cemetery. After a bit of searching both the map and my memory, I found that the statue was on tomb #12, in the east quadrant of the cemetery. This enabled me to determine that it was the Bergamini tomb, which made all the difference in the world to Google when added as one of the search terms. By clicking on the icon for tomb #12, you can find more data about it, including a small picture. Here's a link to Terraserver, showing an aerial photo of the cemetery: terraserver.microsoft.com/image.aspx?t=1&s=10&x=3913&y=16589&z=15&w=2 . To the northwest of this image can be seen several other old New Orleans cemeteries. You can see a small image of the picture I took at home.neo.rr.com/catbar/brain_candy/weeping_child.png.

One other mystery that I used the Web to solve was the identity of two very large ships that we could see in the distance from the waterfront in the French Quarter. After a little searching, again using maps to assist, I was able to place their location at the Poland Street Wharf, where a little more searching enabled me to determine that they are the "Cape Kennedy" and the "Cape Knox," two vehicle cargo ships in the Ready Reserve force, attached to New Orleans since late 1996. You can see an aerial picture of them taken in early 1998 at terraserver.microsoft.com/image.aspx?t=1&s=10&x=3931&y=16589&z=15&w=2 . They are there still and if you notice the photo's scale, you'll realize that these ships are huge.