October 2025.
New Orleans, Louisiana.

This week marks the 21st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In commemoration, I’m stepping outside our regular travel timeline to share one of the most moving and educational tours we’ve ever taken. On our walk to The Katrina Memorial, we passed the Elks Tumulus—a striking example of New Orleans’ unique cemetery architecture. In the background, the Greenwood Cemetery’s above‑ground tombs stand behind the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks’ large mound and sculpture, introducing the solemn landscape we were about to explore.

The final cemetery we visited on our tour is the Charity Hospital Cemetery—the home of the Katrina Memorial since 2008. Our tour, which we booked through Viator, took us through four separate cemeteries and shared the deep history of New Orleans’ Cities of the Dead. If your time in the city is limited, the memorial itself is well worth a visit as a quiet space dedicated to the history of the 2005 tragedy.

The memorial is housed immediately behind the Charity Hospital Cemetery gates. The hospital has served New Orleans for well over a century and provided a burial ground for the city’s unclaimed, unidentified, or indigent dead—the Potter’s Field. Beginning in the mid‑1800s, the cemetery became the final resting place for thousands of people whose families could not afford private tombs or who died without next of kin. Burials were simple, often unmarked, and conducted by the city or by Charity Hospital itself, which cared for the poor and sick long before modern public health systems existed.

As we continued down the sidewalk, our tour guide began explaining the memorial’s purpose and the storm that shaped it—a space built to honor the many Katrina victims who were never identified. The site’s polished granite panels form a quiet enclosure, set apart from the surrounding cemetery and the busy streets beyond.

Our guide noted that our visit to the memorial occurred shortly after the 20th anniversary of the disaster. Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, leaving devastation on a scale the city had never seen. In the chaotic aftermath of the storm, many victims could not be identified or reunited with their families, leading the city to eventually bring their remains here to the Charity Hospital grounds. The memorial was dedicated in 2008 to honor those lives—unclaimed and unidentified—and to give them a dignified resting place.

On the opposite side of the granite panel, a diagram features the memorial’s design. The layout mirrors a stylized graphic of Hurricane Katrina’s shape as it might be depicted on a weather map. Along the edges of the curved walkways, six mausoleums hold the remains of the victims. Choosing above-ground tombs rather than a mass grave directly reflects New Orleans’ long tradition of honoring the dead with visible, enduring structures. These structures provide a dignified resting place within the storm‑shaped layout, a deliberate contrast to the unmarked burials in the adjacent Potter’s Field.

Three of the six mausoleums are shown here, each holding the remains of victims who could not be identified or reunited with family after the storm. A total of 84 individuals were laid to rest within the structures. While most were unclaimed in the chaotic aftermath, nearly 30 remained entirely nameless. Forensic investigators continue to use DNA matching to identify the remaining unknowns, including a successful identification that returned a woman to her family in August 2025. The tombs remain unmarked by names or numbers, reflecting both the anonymity forced by the disaster and the commitment to giving each person a respectful final resting place.

For well over a century, this field served as the final resting place for the city’s indigent, unclaimed, and unknown residents. Long before the modern memorial was built, this quiet expanse received thousands of victims from the city’s 19th-century yellow fever and cholera epidemics, including the severe 1853 outbreak. Though the field is unmarked today, the lawn holds a long history connected to the city’s early public health crises.

In the background, the large steeple on the right belongs to St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, and to its left stands Canal Street Church: A Mosaic Community, formerly Canal Street Presbyterian Church. These two houses of worship sit along Canal Street and the city’s iconic streetcar line. The Mid‑City Neighborhood surrounding the memorial is a vibrant mix of everyday life and deep history—a place where the “Cities of the Dead” stand side by side with corner stores, cafés, and the rhythms of modern New Orleans.

Learning about the history of Charity Hospital and the events that have tested the city over the centuries left a lasting impression on us. The stories held in these grounds are not just about loss, but about resilience, remembrance, and a city that insists on honoring its dead with dignity. In late October, in honor of the Day of the Dead, our Tuesday Trek will return to these cemeteries for a closer look. In the meantime, several images from this tour appeared in a Lens‑Artists Challenge this past October, and you can revisit that post here.

About the photos: All of these images were captured with the Nikon Z7 II and the Nikkor Z 28–400mm f/4–8 VR lens. Most of the editing was done in Adobe Lightroom Classic, with Adobe Photoshop stepping in for a manual distraction removal after Generative AI attempts in both Photoshop and Luminar Neo fell short. I’ll be breaking down the editing process of that opening photo in an upcoming post on September 10, where I’ll share the story of that AI fail and the extensive manual cleanup it required. If it’s after September 9, 2026, you can find that post here. All of the images from this tour are available in my Flickr gallery here.

John Steiner.