Girod Cemetery

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The Girod Cemetery was the city's oldest Protestant cemetery, opened by the wardens of Christ Church in 1822. The cemetery had fallen into disrepair by the time most of these photographs were taken. It was deconsecrated and then demolished in 1957. The remains of whites and blacks were relocated to racially segregated cemeteries.

The cemetery stood roughly where the New Orleans Centre shopping mall -- shuttered since the 2005 flood -- exists, between the Superdome and the Hyatt Hotel.

One longstanding, but disproven, myth suggested that the New Orleans Saints football team had been cursed because the field was supposed to have been built on the cemetery grounds. The parking garages of the closed shopping mall and part of an adjacent Superdome garage most likely occupy the former site of the burial grounds.