Fateful meeting with the 'oil boys'

About this time of year, early in June 1952, a dozen oil executives filed into the office of Lafayette businessman Maurice Heymann on the third floor of his big department store in downtown Lafayette. They wanted to discuss the possibility of building office space for companies dealing with the growing offshore oil industry.
It turned out to be a momentous meeting, although its participants expected something far more modest than what actually happened. From it sprang the Heymann Oil Center, which provided the catalyst for unbridled growth for Lafayette as it became a major administrative center for development in the Gulf of Mexico. That growth, in turn, was the catalyst for development all across Acadiana.
The land that became the Heymann Oil Center was once part of a Spanish land grant given to Michel Meaux on May 4, 1776.
Part of that grant eventually became the plantation of Dr. Percy Girard, progenitor in south Louisiana of the family that donated the land that became UL-Lafayette and for whom Lafayette’s Girard Park is named.
Eloi Girard inherited part of that plantation when Dr. Girard died and developed the land into a nursery. Maurice Heymann bought the nursery about 1940 and continued to operate it until right before or right after the fateful 1952 meeting. It’s said he sold a million dollars’ worth of azaleas, camellias and other landscape plants before closing it as a nursery.
That sounds right. He was a master marketer. One of my favorite stories about him is that when he bought his first delivery truck for the department store – now the natural history museum – on Jefferson Street, he painted on one door “Heymann Delivery Truck No. 1.” On the other side he painted, “Heymann Delivery Truck No. 2.” His idea was to give the impression that he had more than one van.
He’d been thinking about giving his nursery another use since 1951, when oilman Dwight W. Bingham approached him with the idea of building a one-story building for his company, That caused Heymann, who always thought large, to investigate whether other oil companies might need space.
It seems that they did. This was just when “the oil boys,” as Heymann called them, began to see the possibilities of a huge offshore oil industry and the need for a convenient place from which to run it.
That brought about the June 1952 meeting, in which a dozen executives committed to using 15,000 square feet of office space if Heymann would build it.
Within four days, Heymann’s architects produced plans for four buildings with a total of 35,000 square feet, and construction was under way by mid-October. Heymann said later that he thought there might be two dozen or so companies that would be interested in moving in. This time, even the dreamer hadn’t dreamed big enough.
At the end of 1952 there were 11 tenants in the Heymann Oil Center – he leased everything, you couldn’t buy a building. By the end of 1959 there were more than 250 tenants and Heymann, then 67 years old, announced construction of still more buildings in what he called his “Million Dollar Mile.”
His son Herbert took over after Maurice Heymann died in 1967, and things continued to grow until the downturn of the oil industry in the middle 1980s. By then, according to Herbert, “every major oil company in the United States had an office in the oil center.”
In 1984, just before the big plunge, there were 450 oil-related tenants, along with the Oil Center Shopping Village, department stores, variety stores, clothiers and boutiques, the Petroleum Club, a motel, restaurants, a post office, a radio station, and the Hamilton Medical Clinic, which was across the street from Lafayette General Hospital.
In all, the original four buildings had grown to 90 in a 16-block area bounded by St. Mary Boulevard, Girard Park Drive, Pinhook Road, and South College Drive.
As the oil industry continued to decline in the 1980s, Herbert began a multi-million-dollar program to redevelop the center into a home for upscale retail shops and services providers and to find merchants to fill what had once been the seat of the offshore oil boom.
That worked, too. The directory currently lists more than 200 widely diversified businesses thriving where azaleas used to grow.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.