Lafayette Cemetery No. 1's Tour Tickets Will Help Pay for the Upkeep Its Families Were Doing Themselves

Last fall, a week before All Saints' Day, families brought their own weed eaters, pressure washers, leaf blowers and garbage bags to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. They cleaned their own plots and then kept going across the whole cemetery. The Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 Tomb & Coping Owners Association called it the seventh annual Family Clean-up Day. Its recap said plainly why the tools came from home: "Maintenance has been woefully lacking throughout the city because of fiscal issues."

Tomorrow, October 1, 2026, the gate at 1400 Washington Avenue opens to guided tours for the first time since 2019. Most coverage has focused on the "no ghost tours" rule. The bigger change for the people who live around the cemetery is in the contract. Starting with tomorrow's first tours, visitors will pay into the upkeep that families covered by hand for seven years. And the schedule is built so those families still come first.

Who Takes Care of What

Lafayette No. 1 is a split responsibility, and that explains the clean-up days. Every tomb is privately owned and maintained by its owners. The City of New Orleans maintains the common areas: walkways, walls, gates and lights. When city maintenance falls behind, the aisles between tombs belong to no family, and families end up filling in anyway.

The city did do major work during the closure. It replaced the broken asphalt paths with gravel paths laid over a drainage lining. It removed dead magnolias, treated the living ones, and had a structural engineer review the foundation of the cemetery wall. The city's Strawn told NOLA.com the work spanned two administrations and the pandemic. Limited staffing, personnel changes and time spent researching families' concerns kept the gate shut this long. Burials continued the whole time. The city did not give NOLA.com a cost for the project.

Restoration inside the walls kept going too. Nick Black, a New Orleans native and owner of NOLA Cemetery Renewal, has spent the last decade restoring tombs in the city's historic cemeteries, including this one.

"Probably one of the most rewarding parts of the job is seeing people's faces once a tomb that they've had in their family for, in some cases, 180 years, is restored." — Nick Black, to Fox 8

Where the Ticket Money Goes

After a request for proposals in May, the city chose the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans as the cemetery's only tour operator. Save Our Cemeteries, the preservation group that has worked in Lafayette No. 1 for decades, became a department of the PRC in late February 2025. Its staff now run the tours.

A copy of the city contract reviewed by NOLA.com shows how the revenue is split.

The city's share goes to maintaining the common areas, and it grows as the tours bring in more money. That puts the walkways and walls on the same footing as the tours. The 5% fund goes further, toward the privately owned tombs that the city has never maintained.

The PRC has already put its own money into the kind of work that fund is meant for. Before any tours ran, it paid this summer for the full restoration of the German Presbyterian Society Tomb, a 20-vault Gothic Revival tomb built in 1866. The Presbytery of South Louisiana, which owns the tomb, can now reopen it for burials for families in need. Save Our Cemeteries says it has restored more than 50 family and society tombs in Lafayette No. 1.

How the Tours Are Set Up

The tour rules follow from that order of priorities. Under the PRC's plan, tours last 75 to 90 minutes and take no more than 16 guests. They run on a seasonal schedule up to seven days a week, depending on cemetery operations. Guides are expected to reroute or pause a tour so they don't intrude on families. Sara Lowenburg, director of Save Our Cemeteries, told Fox 8 that tours will run daily from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. So the afternoons stay quiet.

The basics, from the PRC's booking page and announcement:

• Price: $30 for adults, $15 for children 6 to 12, and free for children under 6
• Content: history only. No ghost tours and nothing supernatural, sensational or entertainment-focused
• Priority: family visits, funerals, maintenance and cemetery operations come before tours
• Schools: up to 10 free tours a year for New Orleans public-school groups, with discounts for educational, veterans' and local nonprofit groups

The city's own page still lists the cemetery as "CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC" except for guided tours. Walk-in visits are not part of the plan. Families of people buried there can still make an appointment to visit by calling (504) 658-3781.

The ban on ghost tours has a history behind it. Anne Rice's novels and the film made from them brought Tom Cruise to film among the tombs, and Rice once staged a mock funeral there. By 2005, the Los Angeles Times was quoting preservationists who said the cemetery had "been trashed, trampled, spray-painted and otherwise defaced." Lowenburg said families would be paying respects at their loved ones' graves while guides nearby reenacted movie scenes or told supernatural stories. Paul Pastorek, who sits on the owners' association board, said people burying family members were sometimes photographed by tourists. He called it "very obtrusive." The association itself formed in 2019, after a tourist trying to look inside a tomb broke off a piece of it.

Pastorek's view of the new plan is the endorsement that matters most here. He said the way it is set up "does respect the fact that it's still an active cemetery." The city is following a path it has seen before. In 2021, the Archdiocese of New Orleans limited tours of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 to a single company.

The Next Five Weeks on Washington Avenue

The calendar is the first real test of the new arrangement.

1. October 1. The first tours go in, according to the PRC's booking calendar and Fox 8's report.
2. October 31, 3 p.m. The Garden District Book Shop at The Rink, a short walk from the cemetery gate, holds an "Interview with the Vampire: 50th Anniversary Event." So the novel that helped draw the crowds turns 50 in the same month the cemetery reopens, and tours inside will not cover the book's legend.
3. Late October. If the owners' association keeps its pattern, the eighth Family Clean-up Day would fall about a week before All Saints' Day. Its public page has not yet posted a 2026 date.
4. November 1, All Saints' Day. Lowenburg told NOLA.com the cemetery will be closed to the public on All Saints' Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day and other traditional family-visit days. The city's page lists 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. hours for those same holidays. Together, those describe a day set aside for families, not a day open to the general public.

The association's 2025 account of All Saints' Day shows what that day protects. Families came to finish projects, lay flowers, pray and pay their respects. Fresh flowers filled an aisle near the Sixth Street gate. The association described "a peaceful time allowing families privacy at their loved ones' resting places." It also noted the city's policy at the time, which banned public photographs inside the cemetery, and said the city allowed people to gather outside the iron-work gates to take pictures.

A Neighborhood Cemetery From the Start

The way this reopening favors families over visitors matches where the cemetery came from. Lafayette No. 1 was founded in 1833 as the municipal cemetery for the suburb of Lafayette. That suburb covered what are now the Garden District, the Irish Channel and Central City, and it became part of New Orleans in 1853. The cemetery is a National Historic Landmark. In NOLA.com's report, a preservationist the paper identifies as Wollenburg called it "an architectural library." That fits a neighborhood whose houses already draw people for the same reason, as our self-guided Garden District architecture walk shows.

Commander's Palace sits directly across Washington Avenue. A NOLA.com photographer caught people walking from Commander's Palace, across the street from the cemetery, on September 22, a week before the reopening. Mayor Helena Moreno said the reopening "gives residents and visitors the opportunity to experience and learn from that history." PRC Executive Director Kristin Gisleson Palmer called it "more than reopening the gate." The PRC has also said it will work with tomb owners, neighbors and local businesses as tours resume.

How well this works will show up in small ways: whether the city's growing share actually reaches the gravel paths and the wall, and whether the next Family Clean-up Day needs fewer pressure washers than the last one.

At Francher Perrin Group, we follow how preservation decisions like this one shape the blocks around them, from a single cemetery wall to the older Garden District homes that share its history. If you own a house within walking distance of the Washington Avenue gate and want to know where it stands today, request a free home valuation and we'll go over it with you.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.