After reading to the John E. Kushner Restoration Pavilion at the National WWII Museum, Martin Audiffred submitted a query: “Where exactly was the Higgins Industries plant at City Park? What was built there, and what years was it operational?”
As told in the museum’s Andrew Jackson Higgins, a Nebraska native, worked in the ¶¶Ňőh lumber industry in the early years of the 20th century, then transitioned into boatbuilding.
He founded Higgins Industries in 1930 and built watercraft that could operate in the region’s shallow waters, swamps and bayous.
A design called the Eureka “forever changed the conduct of amphibious warfare and transformed Higgins into a household name,” says the exhibit’s text.
A family of landing craft developed from the Eureka collectively came to be known as Higgins Boats. Their role was to deliver attacking soldiers and their materiel across open beaches.
Higgins Boats were used in both the European and Pacific Theaters and the demand for those craft and others manufactured by Higgins Industries called for rapid expansion of the firm’s New Orleans footprint (which grew to seven locations) and workforce (which grew from 75 workers in 1938 to 20,000 by 1943).
The world's largest boat-manufacturing plant
According to Jerry Strahan’s 1998 book " Higgins, who had outgrown a location on St. Charles Avenue, acquired the Albert Weiblen Marble and Granite Works on City Park Avenue and began to build what became the world’s largest boat-manufacturing plant housed under one roof.
Full-scale production of landing craft and patrol torpedo boats (such as PT-305) was well underway at the plant at the time of its official dedication in August 1941.
The site was bordered by City Park Avenue on one side and Delgado Trade School (today’s Delgado Community College) on another.
The Southern Railway tracks, which were critical for building-material delivery and for shipping completed watercraft to the Industrial Canal and Lake Pontchartrain for testing, served as another boundary.
Another was an unused portion of which Higgins appropriated for part of his plant (40 percent of which was constructed on property to which he held no title).
More than 20,000 boats built
By the war’s end, Higgins Industries had built more than 20,000 boats for the armed forces; contributed to the Manhattan Project; manufactured aircraft wing panels, airborne lifeboats, and radios; and repaired military trucks and jeeps, among other contributions to the Allied effort.
Higgins died in August 1952 at age 65 as his company navigated peacetime labor issues and multiple manufacturing endeavors, including shipbuilding. Higgins Marine Sales operated at the City Park location until 1970.
Today, a plaque near the City Park Avenue driveway entrance to Delgado’s O’Keefe Administration Building recognizes the location’s role during World War II, citing landings made by “the boats built on this site” on D-Day at Normandy and numerous amphibious invasions in the Pacific.
Dedicated on June 6, 2011, the plaque places the plant’s wartime operations from August 1941 to August 1945.
Elsewhere, Andrew Higgins Boulevard bisects the National WWII Museum campus and continues toward the river past the
Inside the museum’s ¶¶Ňőh Memorial Pavilion and visible from Higgins Boulevard is a reproduction of the best-known Higgins Boat (or Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel).
In an interview, author Strahan, who helped oversee the construction of the replica during the museum’s earliest days as the National D-Day Museum, noted that a number of Higgins Industries principals from the City Park plant were involved in the work, which he said was exacting in its fidelity to the original Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel design.
“We considered it the last boat off the assembly line,” he said.