Specifically, Marcello thought workers may unearth human bones, knowing his luxury condo near North Rampart and Toulouse streets sat on part of the city's first burial grounds.
So Marcello hired Ryan Gray, an archaeologist, to do a test dig in April 2010. Four feet down, Gray's shovel struck wood.
It was the first of what would turn out to be 15 coffins from the old St. Peter Cemetery that had to be removed to make way for the pool. People had been reminded of its existence in the 1980s, when skeletons turned up during the construction of another condo project.
Because state law requires respectful treatment of human remains, archaeologists carefully removed the caskets, some of which were waterlogged because they were buried below the water table.
"This is not easy," said Gray, who participated in that endeavor. "An adult coffin, intact, probably weighs 600 to 800 pounds, and we were moving these without heavy equipment."
The skeletons were sent to Baton Rouge, where they are being studied in LSU's Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services Laboratory.
DNA testing and examinations of the bones will reveal a lot, including where the people came from, genetic traits, diseases that afflicted them and the ethnic groups to which they belonged, said Jill-Karen Yakubik, president and sole owner of Earth Search Inc., a private archaeological firm that worked on Marcello's property.
"We respect the dead," she said. "We can learn so much from them."
Old cemetery filled up fast
St. Peter Cemetery opened in 1723, five years after New Orleans' founding, in a spot near North Rampart, one of New Orleans' original boundaries, said Angie Green, Save Our Cemeteries' executive director. The graveyard, bounded by North Rampart, St. Peter, Burgundy and Toulouse streets, was used until it filled up in the late 1780s.
Studying the skeletons should reveal much "about the early years of settlement of this country," Gray said, "because the people who are buried there are a cross-section of New Orleans society. They span the social classes."
Identifying them by name will be virtually impossible because a massive fire in 1788 destroyed church records and city records, archdiocesan spokeswoman Sarah McDonald said.
But the skeletons removed from Marcello's property will be reburied in a cemetery, as state law requires.
Once the digging on the French Quarter site stopped three months ago, work on the pool resumed, even though undisturbed coffins remain, legally, beneath the area where people will splash about.
'A few people could get squeamish'
"It doesn't bother me at all," Marcello said, "but I find a few people could get squeamish about it. But you go to church in St. Louis Cathedral and you walk over the (graves of) archbishops and the priests, so it's no big deal."
The most recent of those to be buried within New Orleans' signature building, which was erected in 1850, is former Archbishop Philip Hannan. And during the 18th century, when a smaller church occupied that site, some people were interred in an adjoining graveyard. That space is occupied by the present cathedral, Pirate Alley and the Cabildo.
In the city's earliest days, people were also buried in the Mississippi River levee, Green said. While that was high ground, interment there proved to be impractical because recurring floods dislodged the caskets.
Those are hardly the only burial grounds that have been reused. The Superdome occupies what used to be the Girod Street Cemetery, a fact that was used for years to explain the New Orleans Saints' long string of losing seasons.
Three schools named for Thomy Lafon, a 19th-century Creole businessman and human rights activist, were built in Central City on the site of the two former Locust Grove cemeteries. The most recent Lafon school was razed in September.
And when the New Basin Canal was dug in the 19th century, workers who died likely would have been buried there unless they had family members to claim their bodies, Green said.
The canal, which ran between West End and Pontchartrain boulevards, was filled in in the 1950s to make way for the Pontchartrain Expressway.
"It would not be surprising if there were remains there," Green said.
Not far away, part of Canal Boulevard was built over a cemetery, said Charles "Chip" McGimsey, the state archaeologist.
"When they widened Canal Boulevard in the '80s, there were skeletal remains removed there," he said. "New Orleans is an old city, and a lot of old people lived and died there."
Without scrupulous documentation, McGimsey said, some older graveyards, especially those in rural communities, are doomed to be forgotten.
"Nobody remembers they're there," he said.
But, McGimsey said, "it's always a possibility that when development moves into an area, somebody will be there before you."
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