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Lacosst Monument Metairie Cemetery New Orleans, Louisiana Eugene Lacosst spared no expense when it came to building his final resting place (his will provided $60,000 for his tomb). Built in 1918, in the midst of World War I, when building materials were in short supply the monument is as much a testament to Lacosst’s wealth as it is to the craft of the stone carvers. Architects Burton and Bendernagel of New Orleans, based their design for the Lacosst monument on a memorial honoring a cardinal which was in The Church of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy. The Renaissance Revival style monument, in addition to providing a pedestal for and housing the sarcophagus, takes the form of an exedra, a rectangular or semi-circular recess with raised seats. The cream colored Alabama marble was brought from the Alabama quarries to the plant of monument manufacturer Albert Weiblen where expert carvers had been brought from Italy to do the intricate and delicate work. The giant sarcophagus, housing Lacosst’s remains was carved from a solid block of marble and is finished front and back. The architects specified that only the finest pieces of the Alabama marble were to be used for the monument and their choices were so precise that the discards were enough to build 15 other mausoleums. Officially, Eugene Lacosst was a hairdresser, but through crafty speculation, he amassed a huge fortune playing the stock market. Among his other talents was whistling and he was often invited to participate in musical events held in people’s homes, a popular pastime in the late nineteenth century. To further add to the curiosities of Eugene Lacosst’s life is the provision in his will that his monument should only have enough space for the caskets of himself and... his mother.