Metairie Cemetery, The Jockey Club's Revenge

Metairie Cemetery exists because of a grudge. The site was one of New Orleans' premier horse-racing tracks until the Civil War, and after the war the Metairie Jockey Club revived. When the club blackballed Charles T.

Howard, a lottery millionaire, for membership, Howard is said to have declared that someday the racetrack would become a cemetery. The club later went bankrupt, and in eighteen seventy-two Howard helped purchase the grounds and convert them into exactly that. The racetrack's oval shape became the cemetery's main drive, which is why the roads curve and loop in a way no ordinary cemetery does.

The grounds became the burial place of Confederate generals, Louisiana governors, and New Orleans aristocracy, laid out in a grand Victorian landscape that makes it one of the most architecturally striking cemeteries in the South.