‘The center of the Universe’

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Mar 22, 2009

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Mary Gladney calls her  neighbor, Philemon “Phil” St. Amant Sr., the patriarch of Southdowns.

Because Baton Rouge is a young city and St. Amant is 91, the Gladneys share Stuart Street with the son of the man who developed Southdowns.

The city was growing in the early 1920s — population had swelled to 20,000 — when Alfred St. Amant, a former college professor turned insurance man, and a silent partner borrowed money from almost every bank in Baton Rouge to buy the better part of a 640-acre section that had been part of Richland Plantation.

“My daddy borrowed heavily from the banks and savings and loans,” said St. Amant, wearing a three-piece suit, as he talked in the den of one of his sons, Alex St. Amant. Alex and wife Floris live on Hyacinth. The senior St. Amant lives around the corner on Stuart.

St. Amant whistled when his father told him how much money he’d borrowed in 1923 to develop Southdowns, a bucolic spread of pasture and dairy farms.

St. Amant was a boy when his father told him offhandedly one day how much money he owed the banks.

“Doesn’t owing that much money bother you?” St. Amant asked his father. “He said if it didn’t bother the banks it didn’t bother him.”

Alfred St. Amant weathered the Great Depression to die a wealthy man.

St. Amant Sr., a retired colonel in the U.S. Army not to be confused with son Phil St. Amant, also a retired Army colonel, spent a boyhood in a little world bounded by farmland and swamp. Part of Stanford Avenue is built on a dam at one edge of a cypress swamp that’s now  University and City Park lakes. St. Amant and his boyhood pals hunted and fished in the swamp.

“You shot alligators in the swamp near (present day) Lee High, didn’t you?” Alex St. Amant asked.

Not yet a grammar school student when his father subdivided farms for folks who wanted to get out of town, St. Amant’s boyhood is a memory of “firsts.”

He remembers the first telephones to reach Southdowns and the day electric lights blinked on at the family home on Glasgow Avenue.

Alfred St. Amant knew one of his first big jobs would be getting water to all the lots he proposed to sell. What water was there came from private wells. Before 1925, crews were running pipe to Southdowns from an artesian well on Mormon Road (College Drive).