Jim Bradshaw: Retail giant got his start in Morgan City

After nearly a century and a quarter, the changing times have caught up with an institution that built its reputation on selling hats, handbags, and high-class accoutrements to the elite of New York and Paris.
Some accountants say that the store and brand created by Lafayette native Henri Bendel can’t cut the mustard any more. But for a long time Henri Bendel was the mustard.
He opened his first clothing store in Morgan City with $1,500 given to him by his mother, and went on to achieve fame and fortune in the fashion world.
The current owner, L Brands, the retailer that also owns Victoria’s Secret, will close all 23 Henri Bendel stores after the holiday season, including the flagship store not far from Trump Tower in Manhattan, to “improve company profitability.”
Bendel moved from Louisiana to a shop in Greenwich Village in 1895 and began making hats for the New York’s elite. It was something he’d apparently been destined to do from his youth.
He was born in Lafayette (then Vermilionville) in 1868. His parents were William Louis and Mary Plonski Bendel. Henri’s father died when he was 6 years old but his mother, a native of Prussia, continued to run a furniture store, a drug store, and a funeral home.
She remarried in 1878 to Benjamin Falk, who became one of the most successful Lafayette businessmen of his time. They ran a dry goods store and brought everything from opera to vaudeville acts to the Falk’s Opera House, which was above the store.
Even though both the Bendel and Plonski families were Jewish, Henri studied at St. Charles College at Grand Coteau, and converted to Catholicism while he was a student there. He clerked for two years in the Hiller Plantation Store in Lafourche Parish and then for another two years in New Orleans.
When he decided to go into business for himself, he used the money given him by his mother to open the store in Morgan City. When fire wiped out his business shortly after it opened, it might actually have been a piece of good luck. That’s when he decided to move to New York.
His first venture there, a millinery shop at 67 East Ninth Street, failed when a partner ran off with the money. Undaunted, Henri opened another women’s apparel shop. This one would be successful, but for tragic reasons.
Henri had married Blanche Lehmann shortly after moving to New York, but two years later she died in childbirth and the child did not survive.
According to a biography by Alvin Bethard of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, “Deeply bereaved by the loss of his wife and child, Bendel channeled all of his time and energy into his business. Soon hats with the Bendel label were in great demand and wealthy socialites … began to patronize his shop. He also sold hats to exclusive women’s apparel stores … [and] developed a keen sense of what the New York woman wanted.”
Demand soon caused him to move to a larger store on Fifth Avenue, several blocks away from the current store, which he bought in 1929. Moving to fancier real estate was the right thing to do. He became “a name” among New York socialites and made a fortune.
He kept an apartment on Park Avenue in New York and a 40-room mansion in Stamford, Connecticut. He later built a chateau at Great Neck, Long Island, which he sold to the automaker Walter Chrysler. That mansion had 10 bathrooms, a music room with a huge organ that could be heard throughout the house by remote control, an eight-car garage, a greenhouse, and what was described as one of the fanciest chicken houses ever built.
Henri also kept an office in Paris and opened a laboratory there where he created soaps and perfumes that were marketed under the Bendel label.
He bought 213 arpents on the Vermilion River in Lafayette in 1927 and had it landscaped with camellias and azaleas. That’s how it came to be known as Bendel Gardens.
After Bendel died in 1936 at the age of 69, the store’s vice president, Abraham Beekman Bastedo, took over the reins until his death in 1953, still specializing in hats and handbags and such. According to the New York Times, the New York store was “transformed into a high-end emporium for designer clothes” after Geraldine Stutz was made president in 1957.
Bendel Gardens was made into a high-end subdivision in 1950 by Henri’s heirs.
The Wall Street Jourmal reported, “Since news broke that ,,, Henri Bendel will shut down in January, fans and tourists have streamed into its Fifth Avenue flagship … taking nostalgic last looks.”
The Journal told the story of shopper Tara Weingarten, now 56, who recalled that as a 20-year-old she saved all summer for a $250 Henri Bendel handbag. A week after she bought it, a mugger accosted her. As she recalled, “I said to this guy with a gun in my boyfriend’s stomach, ‘You can take the money, but please let me keep the purse!’”
Weingarten told her son, ‘You don’t understand what this store used to be.’”
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.