NEW ORLEANS (AP) - New Orleans' St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 gained celluloid immortality when a stoned-out Peter Fonda climbed on its ornate, above-ground tombs in the 1969 movie "Easy Rider."

Even back then, many of the tombs at the 215-year-old cemetery were crumbling. And with no known relatives of the dead to help maintain about 80 percent of the tombs, many of them only got worse over the past few decades.

Peeling plaster revealed brick walls that appeared held together more by gravity than by mortar. Some had collapsed altogether.

While such a scene might enhance the ambiance of haunted antiquity that tourists love about New Orleans, it worried preservationists, who feared the graveyard would crumble into oblivion.

But now St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 has gotten a new lease on life.

The New Orleans nonprofit organization Save Our Cemeteries teamed up with the tourism industry, which provided hundreds of volunteers from around the country for a daylong restoration project several weeks ago.

"One of first things people want to visit when they come to New Orleans is the unique above-ground cemeteries, and we found St. Louis No. 1, which is the oldest and really needed a lot of repair," said Bruce Beckham, executive director of the Travelers Conservation Foundation, made up of travel agents and other professionals in the industry.

The work entailed washing and lime-painting 50 tombs and the cemetery's exterior walls, repainting black iron gates, replacing termite-damaged trees and planting low-maintenance monkey grass on barren or weed-ridden ground.

"It looks so much better," said Pamela Pipes, who has five relatives entombed at St. Louis No. 1. "All these beautiful people flying down here, giving their heart and soul to help restore those old tombs. It's a part of our heritage, not just because my family is in there."

New Orleans' cemeteries, with mausoleums built above ground because it was too tough to keep coffins buried in the swampy, flood-prone earth, are one of the city's biggest tourist attractions. Save Our Cemeteries estimates that close to 100,000 tourists visit the graveyards each year.

When most families of those entombed at St. Louis No. 1 lived nearby, cleaning and lime-painting occurred nearly every year on All Saints' Day. But "that's really not happening as much as it used to," said Louise Saenz of Save Our Cemeteries.

Some of the participants in the rehab project attended a training seminar beforehand. They learned how to clean the tombs gently with soap and water, then apply white lime paint that fuses with mortar in a way that holds together and protects the stones from the elements, which in swampy southern Louisiana include torrential rain and ground-buckling heat.

Soot is yet another problem that comes with being adjacent to downtown and the bustling French Quarter.

Save Our Cemeteries also performs emergency stabilization of badly crumbling tombs around the city, but uses experts for that work, paying for it through government grants or donations.

The group has also done work at Lafayette No. 1, which is the Garden District cemetery used for a scene in the 1999 Ashley Judd movie "Double Jeopardy," and at Holt Cemetery, a pauper's burial ground where jazz pioneer and cornet king Buddy Bolden is buried in an unmarked grave.

At St. Louis No. 1, the more popular tombs include that of Marie Laveau, a Creole hairdresser and voodoo priestess. There is also the Italian Mutual Benevolent Society mausoleum, built of white Italian marble by Pietro Gualdi, an artist and architect who died of malaria shortly after finishing the project and was among the first entombed in it.

"You can learn about voodoo, yellow fever, the Civil War, how we adapt to our environment," Saenz said. "They're architecturally and sculpturally unique and really something to see."

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